Category: media-general

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Green Business, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Shortly after starting my blogging career, I switched from Blogger to WordPress and began hosting the blog on one of my own sites, Principled Profit. Since the blog was called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Blog,” this made sense. I also had a radio show called “Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show” from 2005-09, and of course, my award-winning book at the time was Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

But from now on, my blog’s primary home will be on GreenAndProfitable.com, and the blog will be known as the Green And Profitable blog

So after all this time, why change? I still feel a lot of empathy for the brand, after all.

First of all, as a condition of publishing my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, John Wiley & Sons required me to take Principled Profit off the market; they didn’t want my self-published book competing with theirs.

#2: Yes, I have a website at https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com—but that didn’t seem the right place to put the blog. I’m in a thinking-big mood lately, and I wanted something that would encompass the whole world of successful green business, not just the marketing slice.

And finally, I’ve had a long-held dream (at least 25 years, maybe longer) of being a syndicated columnist, kind of like George Will but with progressive, earth-centered viewpoints. I want to use the “bully pulpit” to make a difference on the environment, move the world toward ending hunger, poverty, and war, and reach a lot of people who haven’t read my books or e-zines. I’ve sent out column queries a number of times over the years, but so far, no luck. (I have served as a non-syndicated columnist for various publications over the years, most recently Business Ethics for over two years, until the magazine rebranded.)

With some good coaching from my Mastermind group, I’ve decided to move forward and begin at least by self-syndicating a column called—want to guess?—”Green And Profitable.”

I’ve long been a believer in speaking, writing, and consulting reinforcing each other and moving forward both a business success profile and a social agenda. If I can begin to find newspapers and magazines to take a monthly column (and pay at least a little something for it), I’m hoping my ideas will reach enough people to make a difference in the world. And as the climate crisis worsens, I feel like I can not only be an antidote to all the doom and gloom, but a conduit for ideas that people can incorporate into their own lives…ideas that make a real difference in the world and in my readers’ personal success.

Wish me luck!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , ,

Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:

1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.

2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.

3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.

A very good news day, all in all.

Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, media-general, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with ,

My friend Peter Shankman solicited comments from PR practitioners about Tiger Woods’ apology scheduled for later today, and the fact that reporters will not have access to him during the event; they’ll actually be in another building.

This drew lots of comments on Tiger but basically none other than Peter about how the media will play this. The media, by accepting the unacceptable terms of Tiger’s event-scripting, becomes complicit. If they said, “Hey, Tiger, it’s great that you want to apologize—and if you want us to cover the apology, you have to take questions, or else we’ll sit this one out,” you might have some real give-and-take. But the media has been awed by celebrities and cowed by the access question for too long (look at the unquestioning coverage of GW Bush and the run-up to the Iraq war as another example)—and they’ve forgotten that their mandate is not to unquestioningly amplify PR flacks’ scripts, but to dig deep and find the real story.

I’ve written two books on business ethics and blog frequently on media ethics, and I think that if the media is going to play the role of enabler of bad behavior, the media must share the blame that the real story doesn’t get told. It is the media that certified Tiger as someone worth paying attention to, rather than, say, someone who’s curing cancer or solving the energy crisis (like the amazing Amory Lovins).

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

I read a very interesting article called “How to Weather a Twitterstorm“–and one of the most interesting parts was the comments, which included a whole lot of people who basically said that Twitter, Facebook and other social media are a marginal part of the overall audience, and kowtowing to them is a mistake.

I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Twitter, et al. They have influence beyond their numbers, and there’s certainly precedent for stories leaping out of niche social media into the mainstream, with major consequences. Just ask Dan Rather about the fake memo about Bush’s military service that cost several key staffers their jobs and forced Rather into premature retirement. I have been a deep critic of Bush (and a fan of Rather), but when I saw the memo reproduced online, I knew there was no way it could be authentic. It was done on a modern word processor.

In my view, the article’s author, Abbey Klaassen, is more on target. she offers strategies to evaluate, contain, and appropriately respond to online criticism.

The point is critical that you want to acknowledge and contain the problem, and do so rapidly. And Twitter can be a great tool for this. Smart companies are finding ways to build their brand on Twitter, and one of the best is to be open to criticism while finding effective ways to defuse it. The Twitter page for Comcastcares is a great example of this. It’s all about customer service for cable TV customers with technical problems.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Interesting piece in the Washington Spectator, noting that the Anniston (Alabama) Star seems to be doing reasonably well, even as big-city papers around the country move to Internet-only or shut their doors entirely. Even the Boston Globe is teetering.

In my own area, I read the Daily Hampshire Gazette, published in Northampton, Massachusetts for over 200 years. Northampton is a town of about 30,000; the whole county had only 152,251 in the 2000 census.

Yet, despite a proliferation of local online advertising channels and a tough economy, the Gazette seems to be doing well also. The parent company has even acquired several newspapers recently, and the Gazette also publishes a growing number niche magazines.

Early on, the paper decided it would not cannibalize print with its web edition; many of the stories (especially the local news stuff that would be hard to get elsewhere) are behind a firewall, available only to paid subscribers. Oddly enough, I notice that the link to the Spectator story is also subscriber-only. Hmmm–can this model work? The Wall Street Journal abandoned it, but clearly traditional print journalism is not doing well in a world of free content from professional journalists.

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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 media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media

Anita Bruzzese’s post on what bloggers can learn from traditional journalists is must-reading for anyone in the social media space. As someone who has done journalism, PR, and blogging (among other kinds of writing), I agree with at least 90 percent of her column.

I especially liked her section on rewriting:

When I wrote my second book, I spent three months writing it and three months editing it. I put on five different hats when I read the copy: 1) as writer I made sure the copy flowed easily; 2) as a reporter, I made sure the copy included solid facts and sources; 3) as a copyeditor, I made sure I used proper grammar, correct spelling and looked for ways to tighten the copy so that it was concise; 4) as a workplace/career journalist, I made sure I was giving people information they wouldn’t find elsewhere; and 5) as a reader, I made sure that even if I knew nothing about the subject, it was still clear. (By the way, don’t try and put on all these hats at once. You’ll lose focus and get confused.)

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing

A wonderfully snarky Op-ed in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, called “Typing Without a Clue“–basically attacking Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin for the book deals they’re expected to ink, and saying writing should be left to the many talented but unappreciated writers out there and not sold off as if it were junk bonds by those in the 14th minute of their 15 minutes of fame.

He has a point, certainly–but I’m actually rather fond of the democratization of writing, music making, movie making, etc. There’s still plenty of third-party validation available for those who want to judge these works by some kind of standard–but there’s also an openness, an ability to disseminate a message, that I could never have dreamed of in 1972 when I published my first articles (in an underground high school newspaper published, oddly enough, by conservatives–they ran my liberal stuff with disclaimers). From these mimeographed samizdats–already more accessible than traditional media–to the disintermediated world of blogs, e-zines, Tweets and, yes, hundreds of thousands of books every year is an amazing leap.

Now all we have to do is find time to read one-millionth of it, ha ha ha.

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