Month: April 2010

By Posted on Posted in Diversity, General Commentary, language, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Copywriter Ryan Healy had an interesting post today discussing the reasons why people unsubscribe from his blog. Not surprisingly, many had to do with e-mail overload. But quite a few had to do with Ryan’s openly conservative Christian mindset.

I’ve been reading Ryan’s stuff for a couple of years now, and I’m very far from either conservatism or Christianity. But I still read him. Here’s the comment I posted on his blog that explains why:

I get some posts like those as well. And Ryan, while you and I are poles apart politically (I think Obama has sold out to the conservatives), and while I do consider myself a person of faith, I don’t happen to be a Christian, or particularly religious. But for me, those are not reasons to unsub. You always keep a civil tone, and I think core disagreements force me to rethink my positions, justify them to myself, and sometimes find them wanting and shift. If you were nasty about it, that’d be different. (I don’t read much of Dan Kennedy anymore because he’s way too shrill in his conservatism. I do read Clayton Makepeace, and have even contributed a few articles to his conservative news site as “The Unabashed Progressive”–but I tend to turn off when he goes political).

Anyway, in spite of my ultra-crowded in-box, I’m continuing to read your stuff even as I’ve cut back on a lot of others 🙂

And I love both your commitment to ethics (which I share) and your copywriting/marketing smarts.

I trust also that if you read my blog, you wouldn’t be turned off by the unabashedly progressive positions I often take.

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

It’s rare to have Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreeing on much of anything these days—but both parties were strong in their condemnation of Goldman Sachs and its apparent willingness to give advice to its investors that directly contradicted its own predictions, to bet on those predictions, and perhaps cause the economic collapse of 2008. From McCaskill (D-MO) to Ensign (R-NV), Senators called Goldman Sachs some pretty nasty names.

And the casino analogies are appropriate, except that in a casino, as Senator Ensign pointed out, the rules don’t change during the round of play. Goldman kept changing the rules. It was very profitable for them, but a disaster for the economy.

And yet, this whole coterie of Goldman Sachs executives went on and on about their lack of regret (never mind remorse). It’ll be a long time before I trust them to give ME any investment advice!

One thing I don’t see anyone else picking up on is the possible implication of Former Goldman CEO/former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Here’s an excerpt from the link above (it goes backward, from bottom to top):

12:56: McCaskill: Tourre, do you typically let people like Paulson pick the assets that go into a security they’re betting against?

Tourre: In every synthetic buyer situation, the buyer has to be involved. There are always suggestions from the interested party.

12:53: McCaskill: What’s clear here (from all these emails) is that there wasn’t a great deal of confidence in this “Timberwolf” but the sales people were being pushed to move it.

12:51: McCaskill is reading from emails…

12:42: What’s Paulson doing in the room with the guy picking the assets? Was IKB there? Weren’t they going to be a better to?

Tourre: At what time?

McCaskill: At the time Paulson and ACA met.

Tourre: No, we didn’t know they would be a part of the deal then.

McCaskill: Well, why wouldn’t you tell IKB that Paulson, who they were betting against, was in the room when the deal was being created? That just seems weird to me.

12:42: What about ABACUS?

Tourre: Goldman and Paulson selected ACA.

I don’t think we’ve heard the whole story yet. It promised to be verrrrry interesting.

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

My I-friend Kevin Lovelady is going after a market that few would dare to pursue: people who’ve failed in business.

Kevin, who has been a strong and consistent supporter of my Business Ethics Pledge campaign, feels that people who experience business failure feel “abandoned” and need resources. So he’s set up a blog, a Facebook page, and various other channels to offer free support to those in this situation. It’s certainly a growing market, and I’m sure he has plans to monetize it down the road. Though, from personal experience in the frugality market, I’m not sure if he realizes what a challenge that might turn out to be. I could, however, easily see it turning into a Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 community for mutual support, and THAT could open up many channels to success if it gains traction.

Anyhow, if you or someone you know had the legs knocked out from underneath your company, you might have a look. And Kevin best of luck!

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

The convergence of social media and progressive causes is very exciting to me; I see enormous potential to leverage social media for social change. Even as far back as 2000, I used social media as an essential building block of a successful local activist campaign (in fact, I discuss this in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet,co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

I think one of the huge mistakes Obama made was to let go of the massive organizing via social media during the campaign—a piece of the campaign that may well have given him the edge both in the primaries and in the general election, and certainly a big part of mobilizing the youth vote. Actively using those tools in two-way communication would have helped energize his base, counterweighted the Tea Baggers, and provided momentum to implement the deep change he was elected to provide. In the months between the election and inauguration, Obama put out a groundbreaking initiative to get input from us. But that fizzled quickly, and I for one never got a sense that anyone was actually reading the feedback.

Yet it’s so clear that social media can be a force for social change! We’ve seen it in so many parts of the public discourse!

  • The metamorphosis of MoveOn from a narrow group created out of President Clinton’s impeachment to a major organization channeling progressive votes and dollars
  • Howard Dean’s early power in the 2004 primaries
  • wide condemnation of Iran’s repression last summer
  • Creating sustainability for economic change agents such as Kiva.org

    • Although they are brilliant organizers, Obama, Axelrod, and the rest of his team missed this opportunity. They saw social media as a very effective way to reach new audiences, but not a way to build organizations focused on real change…and not as a method of communication from the people to the honchos.

    Not too late to change this! If they build out their own networks, really listen to feedback, and piggyback on people with large viral followings (such as Rachel Maddow), this could still be a major influencing factor in maintaining Democratic control in the 2010 elections.

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    By Posted on Posted in Diversity, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

    Finally, a decades-overdue move to allow hospitalized patients to choose who should be allowed in to see them! President Obama issued a presidential directive Thursday night making federal funding contingent on nondiscrimination in visitation, and providing much greater respect for patients’ wishes in carrying out healthcare decisions.

    This is a victory not only for gays and lesbians, but for anyone who “chooses their family” through means other than legal marriage, including many elderly, or those with common-law companions.

    The above link includes a video interview with a woman who broke into tears, remembering that she was barred from visiting her dying female partner, and who said she felt like she’d failed her partner of 17 years, because she wasn’t there to hold her hand.

    Obama is to be commended for this. It should have been done by FDR, or Kennedy, or Johnson, or even Clinton.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics Tagged with ,

    The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance.

    I am old enough to remember when the nomination of Robert Bork was rejected because he was so much a creature of the Radical Right. Yet, the Bush presidencies have left us with four justices who are equally far to the right and totally out of step with mainstream American thought: Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and Alito. They are pushing a dangerous agenda in favor of corporate steamrollering, against legitimate government controls on issues like the environment, and appallingly backward on minority rights. The so-called centrists on the court are what we used to think of as solidly conservative.

    The shifts from the likes of the moderate conservative O’Connor and the steadfast progressive Thurgood Marshall to Chief Justice Roberts and Clarence Thomas and their allies have been a radical veering off course. It’s time to get back on course and have a Court that stands for the fundamental values on which this great country was founded.

    These four dangerous radicals must be held in check by a progressive caucus that goes beyond Ginsburg and Sotomayor and can build coalitions with Breyer and Kennedy. Sonya Sotomayor has shown signs of being an outstanding Justice, and I’d like to see Obama appoint someone else with similar values and similar judicial excellence.

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    By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

    I was in my 20s the first time I ever saw a personal computer, and 27 before I had one of my own. That was three years before my older child was born. My kids grew up with computers. Now comes a generation that will grow up with personal devices. They may never use a mouse, a floppy disk will be something they can only dimly relate to (by analogy with USB drives, just as a kid who grew up with CDs might dimly understand that we used to play music on records).

    This 5-minute video shows a two-and-a-half-year-old girl’s first encounter with an iPad. She’s highly verbal, speaking in sentences and even paragraphs. (My son was like that at that age, so I know it’s possible.) And that makes her an ideal test subject, because she can talk about what’s going on for her.

    What pleasantly shocks me is the way she intuitively groks the user interface. Also, how she anticipates absent features that ought to be there, and sees some of the possibilities the technology presents. It probably would not have occurred to me to swipe my hand to the side rapidly to display another window of icons. But then again, I grew up with manual typewriters.

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