Category: People Helping People

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

We *have* made progress! A Utah newspaper, the Herald Journal, ran its first announcement of a same-sex marriage–and only four people canceled their subscriptions!

The paper ran a very clear announcement of its rationale here.

Bravo to the paper–and its readers, who I guess have noticed that the world is changing.

I live in Massachusetts. We’ve had gay marriage for I think three years now. And guess what–the sky hasn’t fallen! I think a lot of the people who supported some of the homophobic responses in the past have realized, now that they see openly gay married couples raising families, having jobs, and enjoying such taken-for-granted-by-heterosexuals privileges as visiting their partner in the hospital, that it is no threat to heterosexual marriage.

I have never understood why they felt threatened in the first place. My wife and I will be celebrating our 25th anniversary in October. We’ve been to several gay and lesbian weddings. I think it makes a family stronger when a couple can express their love and commitment and take on the responsibilities and benefits.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Call for Action: Fight the “Orphaning” of
Writers’ Constitutional Right to Copyright Protection
By guest blogger Jerry Colby, President, National Writers Union

[Note from Shel: This was originally sent by Jerry as a letter to members of the NWU. I asked if I could post it here to share with non-NWU members.]

Librarians typically want to expand the public’s access to their
collections. It’s in their nature to help people grow in
knowledge. While getting a salary, they do not do this just for
money.

Online database companies and publishers, like librarians,
archive works in the arts and sciences. They, too, want to see
more people using the works they have stored in digital format.
Unlike librarians, however, they do this for profit by selling
digital copies of others’ works. For years they did this without
seeking permission from writers and artists who created these
works – until the Supreme Court in 2001 declared this illegal in
its Tasini v. New York Times et al. decision which affirmed that
usage of work must be paid for in electronic media.

The database companies and publishers have not given up their
efforts to seize control of the rights to copyrighted works they
want to sell through the Internet. Beside all-rights contracts,
they have also targeted a category of copyrighted works whose
authors are least likely to defend themselves because their
whereabouts are unknown. The media industry has taken to calling
these books, plays, articles, poems, photographs, illustrations,
and so on “orphan works.” Now the publishers want the legal right
to use these works without the rights-holders’ permission. All
they would have to do, as proposed in new legislation (S. 2913,
the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008), is make a “diligent
effort” to locate the rights-holder which is “reasonable and
appropriate” according to government standards for “best
practice” overseen by copyright experts hired by libraries. Such
searches would be beyond the budgets of all but the largest
publishers and database companies.

This would stand copyright law on its head. Since the 1976
Copyright Act went into effect in 1978, writers supposedly had to
do nothing to enjoy copyright protection of their works. Any work
not in the public domain cannot be used without permission of the
rights-holder. This “opt-in” requirement is in compliance with
the spirit of the copyright clause in Article 1, Section 8 of the
U.S. Constitution, which vested original and exclusive ownership
of works with their creators for a limited time (currently the
lifetime of the creator plus 70 years) in order to encourage
innovation in American society. Such a bill strikes at the very
heart of capitalism’s success and the source of innovation
crucial to any nation’s cultural and economic growth. What is
really being proposed is the orphaning of our constitutional
right to copyright protection.

Should this orphan works bill become law, infringement of
copyright of orphaned works, both domestic and foreign, would be
permitted after a vague “due diligence” search for the rights-
holder. The negative impact this could have is manifold. Our
foreign trade partners who take copyright very seriously would
fight American companies encouraged by this act to raid works
summarily declared orphan after computer and phone searches. It
takes little imagination to see where this might lead.
Retaliatory raids by competing foreign companies on American
orphan works could escalate into trade wars over orphaned
intellectual property. Given the enormous role intellectual
property plays in the global market, such trade wars could easily
expand and unravel carefully negotiated international trade
agreements. Ironically, this orphan works act could damage
international trade in such intellectual property as music and
movies where the U.S. still holds a favorable trade balance.

Congress should signal an end to the decades-long indulgence of
corporate greed and insist everyone play by same the rules. It
should table the onerous bill until a more thought-through
version that respects the property rights of creators can be
crafted.

Congresspeople are very sensitive to influence during national
election years. Writers would be wise to remind their
representatives to observe the constitutional covenant with
American writers and artists. I urge all NWU members to take the
lead here, look at the two letters on orphan works currently
posted on the nwu.org website for ideas, and write your own
letters to Congress. Be sure to also send a copy of your letters
to the National Office.

Gerard Colby, trade union activist, investigative journalist and author, is currently serving his second term as the President of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981. Colby is co-author (with Charlotte Dennett) of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), author of Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Lyle Stuart, 1984), and lead contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Prometheus, 2003), winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for press criticism.

He can be reached at GColby@nwu.org.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

One of my favorite marketers, the brilliant and unconventional Sean D’Souza in far-away Aukland, New Zealand, claims he built his entire Psychotactics business on strategic alliances.

And I believe him.

Strategic alliances are that powerful. Two world-class examples:

Apple, IBM and Motorola joined forces in the 1990s to design the PowerPC computer chip–which dominated at least Apple’s product line (and I think was used in various IBM models as well) for the next several years.

And a person in the audience of one of my speeches reminded me that until it formed a strategic alliance to supply operating systems, Microsoft was just another two-bit hole-in-the-wall computer business.

The comments on Sean’s blog page got into a discussion of the typical Internet-marketer JV, but Sean correctly responded,

The downsides to strategic alliances? I know of few. One is, that because they’re not motivated by money, there’s less momentum–that is they’re less likely to be motivated to help. But this hasn’t been true for me. Our alliances have literally built our business, and continue to do so. And the entire relationship is built on trust. And respect.

The downsides to Joint Ventures, I can list by the dozen. The essential problem with joint ventures is money. When the money dries up, so does the motivation. But it’s also an upside. I don’t know. Call me crazy. I prefer alliances over joint ventures.

I agree with Sean. In fact, I posted my own comment, “Most people can’t see beyond the typical JV arrangements to see the much greater power of strategic alliances (and the friendships that can come out of them)” to grow a business.

Strategic alliances have been an essential tool in building my business, and I haven’t yet structured one like the typical Internet-marketer JV (though I may, down the road). At the moment, thanks to a strategic alliance with Sean’s Aukland neighbor Mark Joyner of Simpleology (another fantastic marketer–what’s in the water down there?), I’m about to participate in what could be the most powerful strategic alliance of my career, a partnership that involves one of the most famous names in marketing as well as a large publishing corporation. I’ll tell you all about it once the papers are signed. 🙂

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about strategic alliances, I cover them in some detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Incidentally, my alliance and friendship with Mark came about because he ordered this book, and I was brave enough to seize that opportunity to begin a correspondence with him.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, People Helping People, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life

In a few minutes, I’m heading into downtown L.A. for my 12th Book Expo America.

I’m remembering the first time I did the show in L.A. It was only my second BEA, and I struck up a conversation in a booth that led ultimately to the contract for my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. Other years, I exhibited Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First at a co-lp booth, nd that led to rights sales for Indian and Mexican editions, both of which have been published. I’ve made connections with editors, agents, vendors, and clients, and I find the show can energize me for weeks (even while overwhelming me with the followup) on top of my usual workload.

This week, already, just from the pre-show conferences, I have a possible subrights deal for the newer, more specialized Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers. Not to mention a few new client leads, some good PR contacts, and some great tips that will make me a more effective author and publisher. In other words, the show dovetails nicely with my attitude that the world is a place of abundance, and good things are there for you if you want to tap into them. Every single BEA has brought good things to me, from friendships and hugs to powerful deals.

And then there’s the social part. Every year, I see friends and have a lot of fun. Last night, at the Ben Franklin Award dinners, I was able to introduce several sets of people who should know each other. Some of those connections will lead to business for the people I introduced. I get a lot of satisfaction if I bring that kind of relationship into being.

It was also a privilege to be at the Franklins for the photo-tribute to the amazing Jan Nathan, the group’s long-time executive director who passed away last summer. Jan was among the warmest and most helpful people in the very warm and helpful world of independnet publishing, andshe had a great sense of huor and a smile that could light up a room.

You can read numerous articles I’ve written about most of these BEAs; the majority of articles on that page come out of these events.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Other, People Helping People, Politics

Fascinating and far-ranging interview with European philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now this morning.

He covered war, energy, US presidential politics, and much more. But the statement that really got to me was:

A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it, and the whole field changes: it’s possible.

He went on to cite President Nixon’s opening US relations with Maoist China, and postulated that if Obama becomes president, he will seize a similar window with Cuba.

But this concept has reach far beyond international relations. In sports, the 4-minute mile was an unassailable barrier for decades; once Roger Bannister broke it, many people followed quickly. In science, it was unthinkable in 1955 that a human being would walk on the moon before 1970. In energy and the environment, the work of Amory Lovins and others show new ways of reinventing society as a more earth-friendly place (see my article here). And in business ethics, I like to hope that my Business Ethics Pledge campaign will make a similar difference in the consciousness that ethical business is actually more profitable.

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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

Last night was the twice-a-year Town Meeting in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts. We still have an old-style New England Town Meeting, where any registered voter can speak (about issues already on the agenda, anyway) and vote. And these votes really do shape the town; every zoning change, for instance, has to get a 2/3 supermajority at Town Meeting.

During the Save the Mountain campaign several years ago, for instance, one of my neighbors submitted a citizen petition to restrict the altitude of a building lot. She gathered the requisite number of signatures,w e organized turnout at the meeting, and her new bylaw was overwhelmingly adopted, along with some others we’d put in.

But some financial outlays are a two-step process. First, Town Meeting approves them, and then, a paper-ballot election is held at a later date, to appropriate the funding.

Last night, a longtime citizen environmental activist raised the point that we
d passed some of these improvements several times, but they kept getting voted down in the later election because most people didn’t know when that election would take place. She asked if the election date could be announced at Town Meeting, but the Selectmen (kind of like a Town council) hadn’t set the date yet.

So I stepped to the microphone and offered to create an e-mail notification list. Then I went home and set up an announce-only newsletter on yahoogroups with this mission statement:

An announce-only media channel to notify residents of Hadley, Massachusetts of upcoming votes and meetings of town boards, committees, and commissions. This non-partisan list will not take positions on any issues. It is solely to notify the public of upcoming votes and meetings. It will distribute information as received; the listowners make no promises or claims regarding the completeness or accuracy of information received. We just want to help get the word out.

By phrasing it as a “media channel,” and by not stating opinions on the matters before us, I will be able to receive and forward the press releases from the town administrator, and hopefully over time several hundred people will be able to learn the dates of the elections in time to vote.

Seems like this is a pretty good model for lots of communities. It costs nothing to set up, and I’m anticipating a whole year of administering the list will add under an hour to my workload. We’ll see how it works.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Miscellaneous items in the news of late:
1] The Weekly Spin, an always-provocative newsletter from PR Watch/Center for Media

and Democracy, reports that corporados and their hired PR guns have stepped up campaigns against citizen activists. Not only are they infiltrating these groups, but also going through activists’ trash, using their spies to release deliberate disinformation campaigns, undermine citizen actions, and generally abuse the public trust. Yeech!

This is not new–here’s an example from six years ago:

“Inside information gives companies a strategic advantage,” wrote Amsterdam-based investigative reporter Eveline Lubbers in the 2002 book “Battling Big Business.” Lubbers helped uncover an eight year-long scam by a Dutch security firm, where one of its employees posed as an activist. He collected discarded paperwork from at least 30 different activist groups, saying he would sell it to recycling plants and give the proceeds to charity. Instead, the documents were carefully reviewed and often used against the groups.

But apparently it’s still very much going on, in both the US and UK, probably elsewhere too.

CIW began being “vilified online and in e-mails that can be traced to the Miami headquarters of Burger King,” reports the Fort Myers News-Press. The emails and comments were posted under the names “activist2008” and “stopcorporategreed.”

2]MarketingProfs.com offers six don’ts for effective e-mail marketing. Item #1–don’t e-mail too frequently; you don’t want people unsubbing because you bother them too much.

But the first reader comment points out that MarketingProfs itself mailed three times within a week about a particular conference.

3] But PR isn’t just for influence; it can also be fun. My friend Ken McArthur is on a campaign to popularize the coined word “zingwacker,” which is in his new book “The Impact Factor.” As of early April, the word brought zero results in Google. As of before I hit the post button, it’s up to 393. Not bad, Ken–even if the Squidoo page misspells your new word in its URL.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Great tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in an Op-Ed by Taylor Branch in today’s New York Times. The article goes waaaaay beyond the standard establishment tributes, and even the progressive pieces that recognize the unity of his call to end racial injustice and his call to end the Vietnam war.

I particularly love these two paragraphs–not in any way to trivialize the struggle of blacks, but to clearly show how many other social movements (including the environmental movement, which Branch doesn’t mention) drew strength, inspiration, and tactics from King and the Civil Rights movement generally:

Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. You never heard of the Sun Belt when the South was segregated. The movement spread prosperity in a region previously unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves. Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.

The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and, yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott.

King was still alive when I started, before I even reached my teens, exploring nonviolent social change. Over and over again, I found evidence that nonviolent mass movements are far more likely than armed struggle to create lasting, powerful social progress, and that the revolutions achieved nonviolently are much harder to corrupt (not impossible, as we saw under Indira Gandhi)–and yes, organized mass nonviolence can even work against brutal dictatorships. Some of the most effective resistance to the Nazis was through nonviolence, including (but far from limited to) the famous heroic defiance of the King of Denmark after he surrendered his country, riding his horse through the streets of Copenhagen with a yellow star pinned to his clothing in solidarity with the Jews–and inspiring his Danes to save thousands of Jewish lives with a clandestine boatlift to neutral Sweden. And of course there was the massive nonviolent revolt led my M.K. Gandhi against the brutal British colonial regime in India.

In our own time, we’ve seen nonviolence achieve miracles, not only in the US Civil Rights struggle, but also, to name a few examples,

  • Solidarity driving the Communists from power in Poland
  • Safe energy activists at Seabrook (I was there!) and around the country making it politically impossible to build more nuclear power plants for the next three decades (we might have to fight that one again, I’m afraid)
  • The end of apartheid in South Africa, in a struggle that was largely nonviolent (contrast that with Zimbabwe, where the “freedom fighter” Robert Mugabe turned out to be every bit as much a dictatorial thug as Ian Smith had been)

    • I totally agree with Branch that many of the social movements of the last four years would have been much harder to envision and carry out had it not been for the Civil Rights movement. That movement inspired us not to take injustice lying down, and showed us tools to fight for justice that maintained our dignity, that needed no weapons or weapons training, and that created long-lasting change. Labor, environmentalists, feminists, and poor people’s movements are just some of the many who have learned from Dr. King and his movement.

    For more on effective nonviolent organizing, I strongly recommend the works of Gene Sharp. I read the three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action more than 25 years ago, and it still left an impresion on me. Not an easy read, but incredibly wrthwhile.

    And meanwhile, I’ll have to put Taylor Branch’s 3-part history of the Civil Rights movement, Parting the Waters/Pillar of Fire/At Canaan’s Edge, on my reading list.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media

    For years, I’ve been a proponent of viral marketing; as one among may examples, it’s the main tool I’ve used to gain support for the Business Ethics Pledge.

    One of the best viral marketers I know is Ken McArthur, known for his joint-venture Internet marketing conferences. I met Ken several years ago at one of Fred Gleeck’s book marketing conferences, and then again a few years later at Mark Victor Hansen’s book marketing conference. We’ve stayed in touch. And since meeting him, Ive noticed that he crops up absolutely everywhere.

    Yet even though he’s obviously been gong to book marketing conferences for years, he didn’t have a book. Now, he’s finally about to release IMPACT: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World (yes, its an affiliate link). I’ve been one of his many informal advisors, and even commented to him a few months ago that I also have a book title that ends with “in a Noisy World” (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, published in 2000 by Chelsea Green

    Frugal marketing genius that he is, Ken wouldn’t be content with an ordinary book launch–so he created one of the most powerful viral marketing ideas I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d thought of it.

    You know the concept of internships: students donate labor in exchange for training. Ken has taken this to an extreme: he recruited over 100 people to be his unpaid Internet marketing corps, in exchange for learning all his tricks via a series of conference calls. What a perfect example of the Abundance Principle at work! The six-week program started tonight.

    I decided that one of my contributions to the effort would be to chronicle it here. So thus, my key takeaways from call #1:

  • 100 people can have a huge impact in a number of ways, for example all contacting the same key influencer, or divvying up John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book (fewer than 10 ideas per participant)
  • Not only are affiliate commissions an effective motivator, but you can motivate your affiliates further by making the deal open-ended. When people sign up for Ken’s affiliate program, they will not only earn a couple of bucks on the book, but also on all sorts of backend products from now to eternity–products that will pay many times better than the book sale.
  • Ken is providing tasks and thus not only training others but outsourcing the ground work. He asked participants to generate lists of key contacts, blogs, forums, and potential joint venture partners.

    • This is an easy one for me, as I know a lot of people in the independent publishing sector. Except that I can’t really separate influencers from JV partners. But because what he’s doing is newsworthy in the publishing world and in the Internet marketing world, I have a number of people I could approach to let them know about what’s going on, including John Kremer, Dan Poynter, Fern Reiss, Patricia Frey, and Joan Stewart–all very big names in the world he’s trying to reach.

    Ken being Ken, he makes it quite worthwhile to visit his site, offering a truckload of quality resources just for dropping by.

    Is this your chance to learn from a master launcher, without paying thousands of dollars for a product? I think it might just be.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Arts & Entertainment, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Artists, authors, and other creatives, take note: Kevin Kelly, the guru of Wired Magazine, says you don’t have to be a starving artist anymore. Instead of grabbing for crumbs at the very end of the long tail, build a base of 1000 uber-fans. All you have to do is add one person a day for three years (not that long to pay your dues, really–historically, many artists spent decades to achieve this kind of fan base).

    Better yet, Kelly outlines how to make this self-funding without anyone worrying about not getting their money back if you don’t make your goal, through a very cool Web 2.0 website, Fundable.org

    Over the years, I’ve always liked Kelly’s work–although sometimes the layout of Wired makes it rather unapproachable. This article, however, is on a blog called The Technium, and it’s very easy to read.

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