A new European survey shows a substantial majority of consumers and business decision makers are eager to invest in energy efficiency.
(Thanks to @thecentristword for sharing the link on Twitter).
Even a majority of Republicans, according to this detailed survey of Americans’ feelings on alternative energy in Huffington Post.
A popular slogan during the 1960s was “If the people lead, the politicians will follow.” Might be time to bring that one back.
Thanks to C Gauvin for the link.
I’ve long been a fan of marketing to different market segments according to their own hot buttons, as anyone knows who has read my books (especially Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green).
Here’s someone on Triple Pundit, looking at the experience of driving a Nissan Leaf from the point of view of someone who sees a lot of potential to go way beyond the green market. Nissan’s marketing and advertising departments might want to read it.
Memo to Mark Zuberberg: You are not invincible. Facebook did not get to be the top social media network because it was terrific, but only because it’s so much better than MySpace. There’s always been lots of room for improvement, and yet, in the 4 years I’ve been a Facebooker, at least half the changes make it harder to use and/or more intrusive.
And now, with Google+ waiting in the wings, your position is precarious. Just as it did with search, Google provides a qualitatively better user experience; all it needs now is an active and vibrant user base. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user experience just took a serious turn for the worse. Again.
Some of these bone-headed things I just don’t understand, especially when you think about how much of Facebook’s income stream is generated by professional marketers—marketers who have, in many cases, invested significant time and money into their fanpages and their ad campaigns.
Mind you, I’m not criticizing the changes just because they’re new and different (though it does seem that just as we learn how to navigate the latest interface, it shifts again). Some of them improve the experience. I like getting an e-mail with a whole thread worth of posts. I like the ticker. And I like that Facebook quietly introduced the long-sought feature a couple of months ago that allows owners of a fanpage to e-mail their fans (those who’ve clicked Like).
But really, you have to wonder if they’ve ever heard of beta-testing or focus groups over there. In the words of one well-known marketer who posted a comment on my annoyed post, “Google+ here we go!”
Allow me to deviate from this blog’s usual fare of sustainable energy, business ethics, reasons to oppose nuclear power, and progressive vs. conservative politics—today’s post is about mice. The four-legged kind.
We live in a very old farmhouse, built in 1743, surrounded by our neighbors’ corn and hayfields. There have always been lots of mice around, but until a few months ago, the cats and dog kept them to manageable proportions. However, between December and April, all three of our animal companions died. We’re looking to get another cat, maybe two, in the fall, but meanwhile, we’re petless.
So, a couple of months ago,we invested in two lightweight plastic no-hurt traps, baited them with peanut butter, and started hauling a series of mice back out to the field. And I noticed very quickly that different mice reacted very differently to the experience of being trapped, and then released. Microcosms of the human experience, in fact.
Here are a few of the characters we’ve encountered:
Finally, there was today’s mouse, with an attitude I have never before encountered—and ’twas he that inspired this post: “Hey! Im not done eating yet! I’m going back in the trap.” Perhaps I should call him “the climate-denying CEO.” 😉
How would you market to these different types of mice?
30 years ago, Dina and I marched in the first-ever Gay Rights march in Northampton, Massachusetts. Organized by a very political—you could even call them militant—group called Gay And Lesbian Activists, the event drew about 500 people. We were proud and defiant in a society where being gay or lesbian was so threatening that some of the marchers wore paper bags over their heads to protect their identities and avoid reprisals. The speeches were all about claiming our place in a rejecting society.
Back then, there was a large contingent of counterdemonstrators from the local Baptist church, shouting slogans and carrying signs that today would be considered hate speech.
A few months later, some prominent lesbians in town received a series of threatening phone calls, and went to the police. A group of activists demanded and received a meeting with public officials. We pressed the mayor for a statement condemning the harassment. He waffled for quite some time until the District Attorney, who’d been quietly watching, said “I’ll give you a statement.” Once he had the political cover of the DA, the mayor quickly agreed as well. And later, the harasser was actually found, tried, and convicted. Yet, shortly after the second annual march, a City Councilor ran unopposed for re-election on a platform of stopping the Gay Rights march. (When his term was up two years later and he still had no opposition, I ran against him. He won that year and was defeated by another progressive two years later.)
Fast-forward to 2011: yesterday’s 30th annual parade, now officially called the “Noho Pride LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Parade and Pride Event” and organized by a group called Noho Pride. The parade stretched for blocks and moved down Main Street to a cheering throng of some 15,000, lining not only both sidewalks but also the midline of our very wide boulevard.
Contingents included students, teachers, and parents from several elementary and high schools…dozens of churches…our local public library, where I and several other writers marched along with the director, assistant director, and a couple of the trustees…and a number of prominent politicians including both mayoral candidates (one gay, one not), Northampton’s State Representative Peter Kokot, and a candidate for US Senate who actually took a booth.
Vendors at the rally site included banks, home improvement contractors, and other very mainstream businesses. There was almost no political content, although there was a large tent for activist organizations, and the tent was crowded.
One of the local newspapers described the scene:
The atmosphere was a jubilant one – with hula-hoopers, a group doing intricate formations with shopping carts, drag queens, Rocky Horror Picture Show actors, the Raging Grannies, and countless school groups, some chanting “five, six, seven, eight, don’t assume your kids are straight.”
In the intervening years, a lot has happened in the queer community around Northampton, including national press in the early 1990s in the National Enquirer (which dubbed it Lesbianville USA) and the TV program 20/20. Several openly gay or lesbian politicians have won their races, including Northampton’s openly lesbian mayor, Clare Higgins, who is finishing up her sixth two-year term—longer than anyone else has ever held the post. Same-sex marriage has been legal for years. You have to look really hard to find someone who isn’t aware of same-sex couples in their places of worship, their workplaces, or their circle of friends.
And the Pride event has gone from a defiant statement of our rights to a festive, touristy celebration of culture. So much so that the organizers were publicly criticized by a group of activists including at least two who were there from the beginning, for squeezing the politics of change out of the event.
To me, while I recognize the validity and sincerity of those complaints, that we can now party out tells me that yes, we are making huge progress in this area, among others.
He asked for feedback, and this is what I wrote:
It has often been a question in my mind how people can get swept up in mass irrationality, why they so often act against their own interest, and how to shift that.
I don’t pretend to have the answer, but one piece of the puzzle is to meet people where they are, agree on the areas where you have commonality, and then nudge the conversation forward a step at a time–while external forces are pushing much harder and faster. Excruciatingly slow, but it does seem to work. We saw this when GWB, in an attempt to block the momentum of the gay marriage movement, actually ENDORSED civil unions. He would have never done this without the pressure of the marriage movement making a formerly-seen-as-extreme step seem measured and rational. But I think he also had to be met on the ground of “family values” to be able to recognize that families are not just a husband, wife, and kids.
And what do you think about it?
Re-examining the “Media Ecosystem”: Reflections on the National Conference on Media Reform #NCMR11
By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com
At the fifth National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR) since 2003, the media landscape was repeatedly described as a rapidly evolving ecosystem—a metaphor I don’t remember at the two previous conferences I attended, in 2005 and 2008.
Looking at the mainstream media, the ecosystem is in tough shape. Massive cutbacks to news resources, a crippling of expensive investigative reporting at the expense of infotainment, rapid dropoffs in newspaper subscribership and ad revenues, and a lot of journalists working for free or almost free are some of the outcomes of massive consolidation and deregulation over the past 30 years or so—combined by a major rightward shift in the politics of media owners that is reflected in the way stories are covered, or if they’re covered at all.
Yes, the Internet is partly responsible. Many people seek out alternative news channels from their local bloggers on up to international outlets like the UK Guardian and Al Jazeera. And people under 30, growing up with computers in the home, never got into the habit of curling up with the morning paper over breakfast. And yes, Craigslist has hurt newspaper classified sections, hard.
But the Internet also made possible the incredible renaissance of alternate media. Anyone can be a publisher or a journalist now, and hundreds of thousands have done so. Many have built strong communities across geographical or interest-group commonalities.
And the collapse of mainstream news was predicted decades ago by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, among others. The infotainment focus of broadcasters bringing technology to bear in order to dumb down popular culture was clearly laid out in their books, 1984 (published in the 1940s) and Fahrenheit 451 (1950s). The Internet was not even a dream yet.
Although I didn’t go with a press pass this time, I did take extensive notes. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to pull out some highlights and share them
Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. He writes the Green And Profitable and Green And Practical monthly columns, https://greenandprofitable.com. Permission granted to reprint this post as long as this bio is included and any edits are approved by the author.
It is now illegal in france to hide your face in a public place—a clear assault on very religious Muslims. Freedom of religion often involves particular manners of dress or hair, and prohibiting them is an act of bigotry. (There is one good thing in the law that I do support: it is now illegal to force someone else to veil herself).
The solution to religious fundamentalism is not religious bigotry. Would there be a protest about banning yarmulkas (the skullcaps Orthodox Jews wear) or crucifix necklaces?
I hope some non-Muslim French citizens organize massive solidarity actions with hundreds or thousands wearing a veil in public—kind of like the King of Denmark donning a yellow star during the Nazi occupation.
I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.
At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.
New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.
Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights: