Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

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

California State and Consumer Services Agency chief Rosario Marin resigned from the Schwarzenegger cabinet after taking criticism for accepting large speaking fees from companies who had a vested interest in the outcome of her decisions.

California policy prohibits this, and Marin’s actions show exactly why. I say this as someone who makes part of my own living as a professional speaker, but goodness, I’m not a regulator regulating my own clients!

A quick bit from the L.A. Times story:

Among the fees Marin took was $15,000 from Pfizer Inc. for a speech in 2007 at a time when the company was lobbying the Board of Pharmacy, a regulatory panel Marin oversaw. Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $13,500 for Marin’s speaking services last year within weeks of lobbying her agency.

“I don’t know how you could justify that,” said Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate), chairman of a legislative committee on accountability and oversight. “The conflict is so clear, in my mind.”

I don’t know either.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics

Yeah, I know, I’m late to the party. Should’ve blogged on this five weeks ago. But I only just found the brilliant analysis by George Lakoff, the Left’s best theorist on the power of framing and language. He wrote “Don’t think of an Elephant” and many other books.

If you want to better understand marketing, patriotism, and a progressive agenda, click here to go and read it. Well worth the time.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

This is a company that is confident in its product and comfortable with social media. Go to https://skittles.com/ and you’ll see (Gasp!) the results page for a Twitter search on “skittles,” in real time.

The “real” nav bar is a window superimposed over the Twitter page

Especially remarkable considering that the product is much-dissed in literature as a quick sugar high that too often substitutes for real nutrition (going all the way back at least to a Doonesbury strip that has Mike asking incredulously, “Skittles is your DINNER?”–must be 15 years ago). And one post that’s visible on my screen as I write this is about “skittlefisting.” Abig BRAVO to them on the transparency front!

I can’t remember another example of a major corporation saying to the world, “we’re not going to control or filter what you learn about us on our own website, we’ll leave it to the randomness of the world.” The only control the site is exercising is demanding to know the age of a viewer and acknowledgment that the company isn’t responsible for the messages.

For people who’ve never used Twitter, it must be really weird. But then again, among the demographic Skittles most appeals to, Twitter use is probably very widespread.

How did I find out about this? I saw a Twitter post from my friend Patrick Byers over at the Responsible Marketing Blog. There’s apparently a whole #skittles thread running at Twitter (the hashtag allows people to search easily for topics).

Speaking of transparency, why did I put # at the beginning of my headline? My blog feeds automatically into Twitter (and from there to Facebook). So by putting the # at the front of this post’s title, I expect that this post will be on Twitter’s homepage briefly this morning, until it gets knocked down out of sight. As a grassroots marketer, I want my 15 minutes of fame. 🙂

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

Fascinating. Paul Smith demonstrated a real-world example of how to use Twitter for powerful real-time research–in product development, marketing, or journalism.

He posed a question on behalf of a client who wanted to launch a Green product that would be made in China, and how that would be received by consumers–and posted several responses at the above link.

I’ve used Twitter to drive traffic to a survey, but this kind of direct and immediate feedback may be even better–because it’s much more human, not to mention faster. Who knew a year ago that Twitter could be used for market research?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Peace and War Tagged with

We’ve known for quite a while that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is rife with incredible corruption. Under the Bush administration, there were basically no safeguards, and stories of money diverted into the pockets of US looters were legion.

Still, I had no idea it was this bad. According to Patrick Cockburn of the respected UK newspaper The Independent, when you add up all the thefts of a few billion here, a few million there, it totals around $125 billion. That is two-and-a-quarter times as much as Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Perhaps the saddest part is that of course, this money is NOT being used to rebuild Iraq. And therefore, not creating some good will to mitigate the horrific effects of our totally unjustified invasion and occupation. A proper rebuilding effort would have gone a long way toward demonstrating that the US had at least some altruistic motives. Instead, the rubble grows, the infrastructure fails, and Americans are hated more than ever.

I hope the Obama administration cracks down on these crooks, gets the troops out (I notice the timeline just got longer, from 16 to 18 months), and shows the Iraqi people that we are made of stronger stuff, and take seriously the mission to help undo the calamity we created.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Four years FedEx took over the Kinko’s copy and office services company, the Kinko brand was dropped entirely in 2008; those services are now grouped under FedEx Office.

When Marketing Sherpa interviewed FedEx’s Director of Global Brand Management, Gayle Christensen, she outlined eight steps the company took to smooth the transition in the public eye and retain/acquire market share. (Note: Sherpa’s content goes behind a barrier, for purchase, after a few days. “Norman,” referred to in the quote, is Eric Norman, of the marketing strategy firm Sametz Blackstone Associates,)

What caught my eye was “Step #6. Set up interviews with bloggers”:

High-profile people (e.g., new chief executives) should do interviews with bloggers, trade publications, and other media outlets to address weak speculations and preclude skepticism, says Norman. “You have to engage folks who are writing about you,” he says. “If you are not engaged, you concede the control of the message to them.”

Find out who’s talking about the merger on social media outlets, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or niche online forums and blogs. Search for the merging companies’ names or set up an email alert, such as Google Alerts, for the company and brand names.

Make a point to comment on blogs or social media sites talking about the merger, especially if something is false.

I’m fascinated that setting up interviews with bloggers warrants a main headline, while traditional media is mentioned but glossed over in the paragraph. It shows how far we’ve come that bloggers are considered opinion molders, while traditional journalists are barely noticed. This is a growing trend, I think, and it has many implications for how we (as a society) deliver and digest news.

I’m a big believer in citizen journalism, including the blogosphere (I’ve blogged since 2004, after all), and participate actively in social media.

Still, I question the decision to pretty much ignore the mainstream press. There’s also a place for the trained and skilled journalist, who knows how to ask deep questions, has a really strong BS detector, and understands the importance of telling a story that encompasses multiple points of view. I, for one, am not ready to give that up just yet.

But I also note that for many years, some “mainstream” journalism outlets have had a very clear point of view, and have thrown objectivity out the window. While in recent years we’ve seen this very dramatically with, for instance, the strong right-wing bias of Fox News or the somewhat less strong liberal tilt of NBC, even during the golden news decade of the 1970s, there were news outlets such as New Hampshire’s Manchester Union-Leader that were unabashedly partisan and sharply opinionated.

With huge budget cutbacks, bean counters making policy decisions, and corporate ownership sometimes casting a pall over the selection of stories and the decisions about how much resources to use in pursuing them, the future of professional news gathering looks a bit shaky from here. I hope it pulls out in the clutch. It’s an important perspective, despite its flaws, and we’d be poorer for losing it.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Want to know why right-wing pundits far outnumber those on the left in mainstream US TV? Bloggers Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald shared a theory on Bill Moyers Journal: having someone like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would interfere too much with the construct disseminated by US mainstream media that the US government and major corporations are our benevolent friends, and they don’t want to air views that might help explain why the US has enemies abroad.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, those preachers of hate, are OK in their view because they are simply putting out a more vitriolic version of the Reaganite “mainstream.” But the soft-spoken, highly articulate and very well informed Goodman (who I consider one of the best interviewers in contemporary journalism) is considered a threat!

Of course, this doesn’t explain how another articulate and well-informed progressive,
Rachel Maddow, gets air. But it says a lot about the nature of today’s corporate media.

In the “know your enemies” department, fans of intelligent TV must read this brief transcript or watch the video. It’s a shocker.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

Editor’s note: Holly McCarthy submitted this provocative guest post, and I’m running it in the hope of starting some dialogue. I share some of Holly’s concerns about outsourcing (particularly about using it to duck around environmental laws), but also believe there can be ethical ways to do it, and that when done properly, it can be an important leg up to the hardest-pressed communities at the bottom of the world’s pyramid. Curious as to what others think.
–Shel Horowitz

Guest post by Holly McCarthy When we talk of business ethics, we’re generally referring to the right way to do business, the moral way that leads to principled profit. But the advent of globalization has brought on a new kind of ethical value that we must bow to, but one which we tend to ignore because it doesn’t concern us directly. I’m talking about the process of outsourcing, a practice that’s pretty common these days because of the low cost of labor in countries like India, China and the Philippines.

Issue number one: The first unethical aspect of outsourcing is that we’re ignoring our own talent and paying people overseas just to cut costs. Our people are languishing without jobs and yet we’re shifting more and more jobs overseas. There are times when we even tend to hand over sensitive information to unknown faces who are connected to us through just a computer and an Internet connection, thus putting at risk our customers’ privacy and identity. Besides this, we are closing down offices in our country only to open new ones in other countries, thus effectively contributing to development on foreign lands and stagnation in our own.

Issue number two: We’ve also taken to shifting our manufacturing operations overseas, not only because of lower costs, but also because these countries do not have effective anti-pollution laws. We are luring them to ruin with huge amounts of money, and the sad part of this whole shady situation is that those who gain from this venture are not the ones who are affected by the effluents that result from the manufacturing process. It’s the poor and indigent people who live off the land who are hurt the most – they cannot afford bottled water like the rest of us and so must still drink from the stream that’s been polluted; they cannot afford to sit inside air-conditioned rooms and so must breathe in the polluted air; they cannot afford medication, and so they must suffer respiratory illnesses and other ailments in silence.

Outsourcing is and has always been a sore point with developed nations like the USA and the UK. The burgeoning of talent in developing countries, talent that is available at a fraction of the cost incurred in hiring local labor, had made organizations take the easy way out. Of course, when there’s money to be made, it’s understood that you want to be among the profits. But there’s an ethical line that cannot be crossed, and it’s up to you to decide where you want to draw it.

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of online universities. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

Just yesterday, I blogged about the massive user outcry over Facebook’s new Terms of Use. Last night, CNet reported that the social networking giant had retreated.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the controversy, saying, “we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

And better still, this time the process will be collaborative–which is especially appropriate, given that Facebook exists because of content its users create:

If you’d like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we’ve created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I’m looking forward to reading your input.

I think I’ll sign up for that group!

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