Month: March 2009

By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

I had the good fortune to follow Dr. Ron Capps, a/k/a “The Niche Prof,” speaking at Willie Crawford’s 50th birthday celebration in Orlando.

Ron started his speech by saying, don’t worry about taking notes; I’ll send you my slides. But please feel free to Tweet. I was one of several people who took him up on it; these are my Tweets about his talk (in reverse chronological order, as they appear on my Twitter page, shorthand, typos and all–these were all sent while he was speaking. The #bbash tag enables anyone to search for all the Tweets about this conference and find these):

Don’t cheat the process. Having a baby in 3 mos is NO blessing. @NicheProf, #bbash from web

…or where they will find you. So you’ve got to be everywhere (and everywhen), via Ping.fm. @NicheProf, #bbash from web

Social media is farming: nurturing yr reputation & the relationships. & You never know what people respond to…. @NicheProf, #bbash from web

(I still prefer to brand my name) Why not to brand 2 yr name: 1. Too common 2. No exit strategy. @NicheProf, #bbash from web

You can meet people online you could never meet f2f. Post great content & people’ll start talking abt you:@NicheProf, #bbash from web

RTs are Inernet gold: @NicheProf, #bbash from web

30K new jobs posted 7 dys at TwitterJobSearch: @NicheProf, #bbash from web

Soc net profiles that give an edge: support yr claims, good spelling/grammr–soldify hiring decision @NicheProf, #bbash from web

20% firms (& univs) are screening profiles and SEing you-Neg impression could be VY expensive. @NicheProf, #bbash from web

Not who you know, who knows you. And you get known via social media: @NicheProf, #bbash from web

Think about what happens when five or ten attenders are actively Tweeting the highlights of your talk in real time. Think about how many people might see it, learn about you, click on your screenname, start following you, see over the next several months several more streams of Tweets about how great you are–and then that person happens to be planning a meeting. Who are they going to call–you–or some stranger they’ve never heard of?

I’d already panned to offer attenders a copy of the slides, and was certainly hoping to be Tweeted. And I immediately stole Ron’s idea and asked for Tweets early in my talk. These are the Tweets (if I missed any, I apologize). Do you think they might help my career?

Caught_Thriving: @CaseStevens some really good stuff from @nicheprof and @shelhorowitz earlier #bbash

MichealSavoie: Finding that @shelhorowitz is an outstanding speaker who offers a LOT of very actionable information! Follow him! #BBASH

marismith: @mrebay LOL. Hi Kevin! Way cool you’re hanging with many of my fave peeps at #BBASH @FeliciaSlattery @lynnterry @LauraFenamore @shelhorowitz

mrebay: @ShelHorowitz is an awesome marketer!!!! Testimonials in your book can get your referrals and business #BBASH

changenetwork: RT @DrMollieMarti “RT @FeliciaSlattery: Honesty, integrity, quality = the magic triangle of business ethics. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH”

marismith: RT @DrMollieMarti: RT @FeliciaSlattery: Honesty, integrity, quality = the magic triangle of business ethics. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH [Yes!!]

raleighgirl: Retweeting @FeliciaSlattery: competence is the other half of trust @ShelHorowitz #BBASH (it’s also one of my 3cs of credibility!)

FeliciaSlattery: competence is the other half of trust @ShelHorowitz #BBASH (it’s also one of my 3cs of credibility!)

FeliciaSlattery: When you do business w/ ethics & integrity you get more of everything: JVs, customers, referrals. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: Customer evangelization is abt as good as it gets. Those who tell the world abt you. Comes from doing biz w/ integrity. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

DrMollieMarti: RT @FeliciaSlattery: Honesty, integrity, quality = the magic triangle of business ethics. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: Holy moly: @ShelHorowitz just used ME & what I spoke about yesterday on one of his slides. I [heart] him now. LOL #BBASH

jimdonovan: I’ve known @ShelHorowitz for a dozen years and he’s one of the true good guys. ##BBASH

life_enthusiast: @FeliciaSlattery I second what @MariSmith said. RT @MariSmith We need more peeps with HIGH standards, ethics, eh! #BBASH

marismith: @FeliciaSlattery Brilliant!! That’s what I love about @ShelHorowitz. We need more peeps with HIGH standards, ethics, eh! #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: @marismith yep @ShelHorowitz is on stage now giving awesome content abt ethics. He turns down $$ when it’s not a good fit for him. #BBASH

marismith: @FeliciaSlattery Oh, is @ShelHorowitz on stage right now at #BBASH? Give him a hug for me, Shel is the BEST!!

mrjaredjames: @FeliciaSlattery RT: “Honesty, integrity, quality = the magic triangle of business ethics.” Super col. From #BBASH ?

Raven73: RT @FeliciaSlattery: You want to be attracting rather than chasing business. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: Honesty, integrity, quality = the magic triangle of business ethics. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH his work is grounded in value & ethics

MichealSavoie: Why are you REALLY in business? @shelhorowitz #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: RT @lynnterry: @shelhorowitz is speaking at #bbash – last speaker of the day. talking ethics, relationships, expertise

neestaples: RT @FeliciaSlattery: You want to be attracting rather than chasing business. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

lynnterry: @shelhorowitz is speaking at #bbash – last speaker of the day. talking ethics, relationships, expertise

FeliciaSlattery: You want to be attracting rather than chasing business. @ShelHorowitz #BBASH

FeliciaSlattery: @ShelHorowitz getting started @ #BBASH. His attention-getter had everyone standing up & hugging ourselves. Yay!

One thing to point out here: Several people who retweeted or commented in this conversation weren’t even at the conference! And one of those was social media rockstar Mari Smith, who Fast Company dubbed “The Pied Piper of Facebook,” and who is personally responsible for getting me (and probably hundreds of others) onto Facebook. Mari has 24,205 followers! However many of them happened to be online during my speech saw her multiple endorsements of me within a few minutes’ time.

Oh yes, and meeting planers can use this too. Allison Nazarian included me in an expert teleseminar series this winter. Even though she was interviewing, she managed to Tweet coverage of every speaker, which you can follow here. (The ones about me, specifically, are here: https://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23DIY09+%40shelhorowitz

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

Very interesting discussion at LinkedIn on when it is or isn’t OK to pay referral fees. I don’t believe you have to be a member to see the discussion though you do if you want to make a comment (might have to join the group first, I don’t know).

Here’s my take.

When colleagues refer new business to me, I offer them a choice: commissions or “karma points” (good vibes and my thanks). As a copywriter, I get referrals from designers, complementary service providers, etc. I am comfortable with whichever they choose and see no ethical problem in my industry with paying a referral fee, any more than I do in paying a commission when someone sells a physical product.

However, there are industries where cash payments could easily be problematic if not disclosed, not just because of regulations but also because of ethics. The financial services field strikes me as a place to be particularly upfront, as with any companies providing services to elders, disabled people, or others in a position of vulnerability. And the issue of someone within a company referring to another part of the company is another place to be very upfront.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , ,

In the mid-80s, a new local bank opened in these parts: The Bank of Western Massachusetts. Its whole ocre identity was as a business bank that understood doing business in Western Massachusetts. and as more and more small local banks got swallowed up by regional and national conglomerates, that was a powerful USP.

So I was pretty shocked to flip through my local paper and see an ad proudly proclaiming a change of the Haydenville branch to “Legacy Banks.” Hmmm…take a strong regional identity, throw it away, and replace it with something that means “what you leave behind when you die.”

So I did some Web surfing. It seems that Bank of Western Mass is actually becoming part of something called People’s United Bank, which is not the same as the existing People’s Bank or United Bank (both long-established brands around here. People’s United is a consortium of six banks from around New England. Perhaps it’s selling off some units in order to raise money for the merger. Then I went to Legacy Bank, where I discovered that this entity started as the Lee National Bank in 1835 and has seven locations each in Berkshire County (the westernmost part of Massachusetts) and the neighboring portion of New York State, going into Albany. Neither website says anything about the shift of the Haydenville branch, and quite frankly, the newspaper ad is pathetic. the headline is “smart banking comes to Haydenville” (yes, that’s how it was capitalized), the copy tells me basically nothing about why this is smart, and then it mentions the name change.

Forgive me if I don’t see the logic.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

Someone on LinkedIn asked, “Is there an opportunity for a startup online business to become a successful brand when there are so many established players?” I think my answer is worth sharing here.

Think back to 1997. Where did you go for search? Probably Yahoo or AltaVista. Google came in and blew them out of the water *because the user experience was so much better.*

Think about Facebook jumping from academia to mainstream in the last couple of years, right after Rupert Murdoch spent an enormous fortune to buy MySpace–and made MySpace much less relevant.

Think about Amazon developing the affiliate model, so that any mom-and-pop website could add a bookstore with no work involved–and how that fueled explosive growth.

So the answer is clearly yes, if you have an attractive user experience that’s better than what else is out there.

I’d recommend reading the partnering strategies sections in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, https://www.principledprofit.com – it’s far easier to go where there’s already an existing audience than to create your own from scratch.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

People are always telling me they don’t “get” Twitter. I took to it immediately, maybe because I’ve been doing social media marketing since 1995, and writing about it since 1991. In honor of being named one of the Top 11 blogs covering social media, here’s a 5-point Twitter success strategy.

1. Post some really worthwhile links, good commentary, etc.
2. Follow a few influential people and then send an appropriate @ message to them once in a while
3. Keep the signal: noise ratio high, but engage in human dialog–don’t make it all about you–pick a few people to engage in meaningful sustained conversation
4. Retweet when you find posts useful
5. Post often enough to keep active, not so often that you annoy people

Bonus tip: Your profile page should have a real photo, real name, web links, and perhaps something else of interest (I have my book covers). Here’s a link to mine.

And it takes care of itself. I joined in August and have nearly 1200 followers, haven’t chased them, just used the above method.

BTW, my new e-book, “Web 2.0 Marketing for the 21st Century” (which I include as a bonus with either of my Grassroots Marketing books, or sell separately for $12.95), goes into Twitter and Facebook strategies in much more detail.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s in incredibly bad taste to give out 7-figure bonuses to the execs who drove your company (and the whole economy) to ruin while holding your hand out to collect billions in government bailouts. Worse than the auto CEOs flying separate corporate jets to go begging in Washington, at about $20K a pop. This is simply an outrage. Bonuses are supposed to reward performance. This performance is not worth rewarding, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding these bonuses.

President Obama ordered Secretary Geithner to use “every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.” I totally support his call. And I look forward to seeing these thieving and clueless pretenders to the throne of economic wisdom grovel before Congress tomorrow.

Of course, if the execs are smart, they’ll donate their huge bonuses to the recovery effort. And if they’re not, it wouldn’t surprise me if they find themselves the victims of physical attacks on their homes or their persons. I don’t condone that kind of violence (in fact, I don’t condone violence at all), but it would be a predictable result of this kind of class warfare mentality, and they should not be shocked to see angry mobs at their gated communities. People have lost their homes, lost their jobs, because of the incompetence of these executives and the companies they operate. To take home bonuses several times the size of the typical American paycheck under these circumstances has no positive benefit, it only serves to incite.

This is OUR money these companies are squandering, after all.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Bernard Madoff is, by his own admission, a despicable human being. Here’s the opening paragraph of his statement on sentencing:

Your Honor, for many years up until my arrest on December 11, 2008, I operated a Ponzi scheme through the investment advisory side of my business, Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC, which was located here in Manhattan, New York at 885 Third Avenue. I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come. I am painfully aware that I have deeply hurt many, many people, including the members of my family, my closest friends, business associates and the thousands of clients who gave me their money. I cannot adequately express how sorry I am for what I have done. I am here today to accept responsibility for my crimes by pleading guilty and, with this plea allocution, explain the means by which I carried out and concealed my fraud.

You can read the whole confession at the AP site, here.

Well, I’m glad he’s finally decided to be transparent. Yes, it’s far too little, too late. But it’s better than we ever got from Ken Lay…or for that matter, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other war criminals who brought us knowingly into war on false pretenses. They don’t seem to believe in admitting even mistakes, let alone frauds. And let’ face it–the cost of our fraudulent entry into Iraq has been far worse than the $65 billion that Madoff scammed. Economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes put the cost at a jaw-dropping three trillion–that’s 46 Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes, and that doesn’t even count the human cost of the dead and the wounded and the broken families and those raised to commit terror to avenge the injustice they’ve experienced at the hands of the US.

When Bush was asked in 2004 what his biggest mistake had been since 9/11, he was unable to come up with an answer. Does that mean Iraq was a fully deliberate decision? And since that time, the litany of mistakes–or, Heaven help us, deliberately wrecking things–includes Katrina, wiretapping, attrition of civil liberties, blatant cronyism, and trashing the economy. Still no apology, not even an admission of being wrong.

So on that level, Madoff’s sudden case of candor is refreshing, if somewhat disingenuous. But I draw the line at “I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible.”

Hello! Where’s the personal responsibility here? It continued, because Mr. Madoff knowingly allowed it to continue. At any point, he could have stopped the juggernaut, admitted guilt, repaid the stolen money, and maybe served five or ten years in prison. In what way was he unable to stop? I don’t buy the argument that he was helpless in the matter, any more than I buy the argument that a wife-beater can’t seek help and stop committing violence. Help is available from lots of places, but it all starts with number one: take responsibility for your behavior.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

An open letter to Bernie Madoff (how appropriate, that last name!)

Dear Mr. Made-off

Was it worth it?
$50 billion in your pocket–but the rest of your life in jail and your name disgraced forever?

Was it worth it to have kicked the legs out from under some of the worthiest charities in the country, not to mention thousands of individual investors for some quick personal gain?

And why does anyone need $50 billion to begin with? Couldn’t you have lived lavishly enough stealing just a few million?

You are a disgrace to the business community! Thank goodness there are those who think differently about business, who accept the consequences of their actions, and who use business to advance the common good. Business at its best is a laboratory for innovation, a funnel for economic improvement, and the engine of the economy.

Bernard Madoff, How great you could have been if you’d used your considerable skills toward better ends! Do you feel any guilt and shame? Or just frustration that you got caught?

Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

This is the sort of post that’s often directed against Microsoft. But this time, Microsoft is the victim.

After last year’s skeevy maneuver of making it very difficult for on-demand-printed authors to do their printing anywhere else besides one of Amazon’s own printing companies, now it has announced it’s discontinuing support for rival e-book formats, such as those form Microsoft and Adobe.

Sigh. Will someone please tell them that the old cutthroat competition model is dead? And that customers don’t like to be bullied? Amazon’s model used to be about choice–remember “Earth’s largest selection”? What happened?

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

A Neilsen Online study, quoted by Adam Ostrow on Mashable, claims “66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.”

In other words, social media has become more popular than e-mail.

I’d find this hard to believe if I didn’t have kids in their teens and 20s. In that demographic, e-mail is all-but-irrelevant, except when they need to talk to parents or teachers. They talk to each other on Facebook and Skype and mobile text messaging–all day long. This is one very wired generation; my wife reports that her university students constantly try to text their friends during class, even at the risk of lowering their grades. To my generation, that’s really rude. To theirs, it’s accepted, almost demanded.

As for those who text while driving, or worse, that idiot who killed himself and others by driving a train while texting, that’s a serious safety hazard for those around you, and should be treated like driving drunk. No way can you drive safely while your eyes are looking down making sure your thumbs are in the right place.

I love social media. I’m always haunting Twitter, though from my own computer and not from a phone. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and some other sites. But call me old-fashioned; I still prefer e-mail for many situations.

And even though I don’t text, I certainly see the power of texting. Especially in situations where talking isn’t practical. But I wonder, will this be the generation that forgets how to talk on the phone, just as we were the generation that forgot how to write letters? I never understood why my daughter and some of her friends prefer to text, despite the awkward interface and much higher cost (our cell plan charges extra for all texts, because we got it for the voice features) than a computer-based solution–or than picking up the phone.

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