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 Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with ,

Latest idiocy in my inbox:

Avoid the PR Spam Blacklist

Last week a well-regarded blogger published and blacklisted the names of individual PR firms and publicists who have sent “unsolicited (and almost always irrelevant) product pitches.”

While we know that you do not set out deliberately to “spam” journalists, it is clear that the practices that we have relied on in the past are no longer effective for engaging today’s media. Many of these practices are, in fact, counterproductive.

Our industry is changing.  And as professionals, we must adapt to the way that our audience – the media – is doing business today. Journalists want story ideas they can use. Journalists don’t want an email box full of spam.

New rules require new tools. And we think our application…(Named product and sales pitch begin here)

Hello–how did this happen to get into my in-box? If you guessed as a spam, you’re right. I have no prior relationship with this company, and if spamming me with a message about how spamming is ineffective is any indication of their intelligence, I’m not going to have a relationship with them.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Since John Wiley & Sons is publishing my next book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I was very pleased this morning to discover a press release about its first sustainability/responsibility report.

Wiley’s press release includes ten accomplishments for the fiscal year just ended, addressing everything from responsibly sourced paper and lower paper consumption to carbon control to social outreach in its headquarters town of Hoboken, New Jersey–and eight goals for the current year, focused on broadening its impact beyond its own corporate borders.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

One of the two most successful environmental activist groups I’ve ever been involved with is the group I founded ten years ago in Hadley, Massachusetts: Save the Mountain.

We were formed specifically for one purpose: to stop a super-destructive proposed housing development going up the entire side of a mountain immediately next to the much-loved state Mount Holyoke Range State Park/Joseph Allen Skinner State Park.

All the “experts” agreed this was a terrible project, but they said “there’s nothing we can do.” And that’s when I got mad enough to do something about it. I figured the campaign would take five years, but we involved over a thousand environmental activists (at least to the level of putting up a bumper sticker or yard sign, or singing a petition)–and we stopped the project in just 13 months. About 35 people were in the core, working on a number of fronts to make sure this monstrosity was never built. People brought a wide range of strengths to the effort. I had an organizing and marketing background, but I knew nothing about lobbying, state land issues, or endangered species. Others in the group had all that expertise, to name just a few things.

Yesterday, about half of that core group gathered for a tenth-anniversary celebration: a hike through the land we’d saved (now owned by the adjoining state park) and a potluck at my house (site of the very first meeting, which drew over 70 people).

Jim Seltzer, Chris Dixon, Holly Perry
Jim Seltzer, Chris Dixon, Holly Perry
on the Save the Mountain Hike”]Preparing to Depart on the Save the Mountain Hike[/caption]

I go into the history and success of Save the Mountain a bit in my award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

Some of our naturalists
Some of our naturalists
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General Tagged with , , , ,

Exactly how did Bernie Madoff steal his billions? Why are Halliburton’s hands so dirty? What happened with corruption cases in the rebuilding of Iraq? Following a link from EthicsWorld’s e-newsletter, I came to a single URL that has multiple stories on corruption: https://www.ethicsworld.org/publicsectorgovernance/corruptioninvestigations.php#sec.

This is what we’re up against, those of us who believe in ethics.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Who knew? The tomato blight that’s been ravaging organic farms and gardens in my area of Western Massachusetts has been traced to starter plants apparently grown originally at one location in the South, and shipped to some of the big-box suppliers like Wal-Mart.

I know at least three local farms growing tomatoes in commercial quantities that have no crop this year. Thousands of infected plants had to be destroyed. At least one of those started their own plants from seed, and yet was done in by blight spreading from infected plants grown far away form the local ecosystem. And of course, organic farms can’t, by definition, use chemical fungicides.

Just tearing out our half-dozen rotten, smelly, toxic plants and doing our best to dispose of them properly was a job and a half. I can’t imagine dealing with a whole field’s worth.

In 2007 and 2008, we averaged about 1600 tomatoes, with a taste that simply cannot be equaled with commercial methods. This year, we managed to harvest *one* San Marzano before the blight set in. We still have a few from the hundreds that I dried last year, but not having fresh tomatoes is a huge disappointment. Still, I count my blessings. Compared to those who farm for a living and/or supply CSA members, we had a lot less to lose. Farms are faces losses of thousands and thousands of dollars.

The sad thing is, the farms hardest hit are those with a commitment to local, sustainable agriculture–tainted by other companies’ reliance on non-local, centralized systems that allowed this nasty disease to blanket the Northeast all the way out to Ohio.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

OK, so everyone knows by now, bottled water is uncool if you live in a place where the water is fit to drink (and that includes most of the U.S., Canada, and Europe, as well as many other parts of the world). Issues include environmental impact, cost, depletion of public resources, and centralization of corporate power.

On the other hand, the health benefits of water are very clear—and having suffered a kidney stone, I personally make a priority of drinking water a whole lot.

So…what do you do when you need that second (or third, or eighth) drink of water, but you’re out and about? Triple Pundit just featured a free service that matches those offering water with those who need it.

And quite correctly, TP spent some time on the advantages to businesses of participating: getting people in the door, positive word-of-mouth, and more—but they missed a big promotional opportunity: This clever idea, called TapIt, so far has database listings only in New York City and Orlando, but the concept is infinitely scalable. If you have a physical location and can wash a few extra dishes, visit the TapIt site and click “become a partner.” And then, smart marketer that you are, send out a news release in your local area announcing that you’re the very first business in (location) to participate in this environmentally friendly act of good will.

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

My friend Elsom Eldridge has a nice article about how to avoid becoming “Social Media Roadkill.” And I agree with almost everything he says.

Almost everything. With my usual focus on transparency, here’s what I disagree with (emphasis added):

Be personable but don’t give people a reason to dislike you. Mention your dog or your kids so that consumers see you in a dimensional way; skip over religion and politics where you are sure to make enemies no matter what you say.

This was my response:
On the whole, good advice–but I think it’s possible to succeed in social media without hiding your politics. As long as you don’t promote them in an offensive way. I’ve had spirited but friendly debates on political issues for years via social media. My politics are part of who I am, and it would be a blow against integrity to hide them.

I find that most people respect my stances, even when they disagree. And I am careful to challenge views while not attacking the person who holds those views, to keep the debate positive, to avoid namecalling or other forms of dumping.

Some of the people I disagree with strongly about politics have in fact sent me clients, endorsed my books, and had long, complex off-list explorations with me about our points of agreement and disagreement. I am seen as a friendly, helpful, and yes, opinionated person.

Shel Horowitz, award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

What an outrage! If there is a PR equivalent of disbarment, Bonner & Associates would be a candidate.

As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure.

The letters, as it turns out, were forgeries.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

You can read the newspaper article here If you prefer audio. Democracy Now covered this today (briefly) as well.

I make a good part of my living as a Pr copywritier and marketing strategist, and I’m totally appalled. I also note that all the press coverage I’ve seen points out that this particular firm has a long history of “astroturfing,” which casts suspicion on the claim that this was an accident. I don’t know how you forge a letter from an imaginary person on someone else’s official letterhead—twice!—and call it an accident. I also don’t know how you can run a PR agency for decades for 25 years and not think that the Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics has any relevance to you.

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

This is something I’ve been struggling with pretty much since I joined Twitter over a year ago: how do you let people know you appreciate what they’ve done without filling up your Twitter stream with posts that are of low value to other readers?

Yes, if they’re following you, you can send a DM (Direct Message). But if they’re not, you have no choice but to post in the public stream. Because I don’t want my page to be dominated by what-should-be-private thank-yous (I hate it when I visit someone else’s page and see 70% of the Tweets are thank-yous, and I don’t choose to follow those people), and because when I’m thanking for retweets (reposting something I’ve posted, so their own network sees it) or Follow Fridays (nominations of cool people to follow) it’s generally a mixture of followers and non-followers, I’ve tended to send a group thank-you to everyone at once (which is very easy to do on TweetDeck). I don’t always know who is in each category, and it’s certainly frustrating to try to DM someone only to discover they aren’t following you.

I don’t send a thank-you for following me, because I don’t see auto-DMs as adding value very much of the time, and with over 2000 followers, it’s not practical to send real individual notes. But I do like to say thanks when someone retweets or nominates me as a cool person to follow. And yet, if my stream were filled with personal thank-yous to those not following me, the stream would become boring and people would stop nominating me.

Today, I logged on to find that someone had criticized my group thank-you practice, in both an @ reply (public) and a DM (private). He didn’t feel the group thank-you was sufficiently personal. And he’s right–I’ve never felt the solution was ideal.

So I wonder…what IS the ideal way to handle this? How do YOU balance the need to be personal with the need to deliver high value in a Twitter profile? I’m eager to hear your comment either below or on Twitter @ShelHorowitz .

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

I just answered a reporter query about sponsored blogs and sponsored tweets–specifically whether they should be disclosed. And that led me to meditate on the question of whether it is ethical to ghostwrite tweets and blogs for other people.

I have a very clear opinion on both of these scenarios. But I’m going to shut up and see what y’all think, for a few days, and then I’ll tell you my thoughts, and the reasons behind them.

What do you think?

1. Should a blogger or tweeter disclose sponsorship?
2. Is it ethical to ghostwrite blogs and tweets?

To keep the lawyers happy: unless you specifically state otherwise, posting your response gives me the nonexclusive right (but not the obligation) to quote you in an article, blog post, and/or book

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