Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

If you’re in the marketing world, you’ve probably heard people say “I want this to go viral” or even “I’m going to make a viral video.”

The problem with that is that none of us can control what takes off in the public imagination, or even in the imaginations of enough of a cult that something goes viral within a niche.

Sometimes, the deliberate efforts of creators are successful. I am guessing the “Will It Blend?” ad series was designed very carefully to be passed around a lot. But other times, all the careful design in the world still results in only a few thousand pass-alongs. I’d say the vast majority of projects designed to go viral achieve very little traction—because the market recognizes when it’s being manipulated, and most attempts at deliberate “virality” contain a strong, obvious commercial element

And yet, the ones that really do go viral often don’t try to make any money. I am quite sure that Susan Boyle never dreamed that her video audition for “Britain’s Got Talent” would be seen by more than 86 million people (the combined view stats for just the first two out of 1,460,000 results for a Google search on “susan boyle britains got talent”). I just watched it again, and am still amazed by not only the power of her singing, but the contrast with her frumpy appearance and clueless personality. How could you not fall in love with that video?

Thinking about this today as I look over the comments for two recent blog entries: My 10-year reflection on 9/11 and the lost opportunity for peace, posted September 11, and a guest post by a conservative Christian friend, Steve Jennings, reflecting on his friendship with me—an unabashed progressive—despite our huge political differences, posted September 15.

I had some hopes in writing the 9/11 piece that it might go viral: posted on the tenth anniversary when everyone was once again talking about the attacks, talking about the better world that could have been created had we been blessed with visionary leadership instead of the small-minded vengeance of George W. Bush and his cronies. I tweeted the link a few times, a few other people picked it up, and response was very positive—but very limited. It did not bring me new audiences, though was reasonably popular among my existing readers. It has so far earned four comments and a bunch of retweets. and it somehow managed not to draw even a single attack from the right-wing lunatic fringe.

Steve’s post, which I didn’t promote as heavily, drew a number of retweets (which are, oddly, not showing up on the blog page), though only one comment. Again, uniformly positive, though not big numbers.

Steve’s post was not tied to a particular day and will be timely for many years; it may yet build more comments over time. The 9/11 article, other than from those reading here, is not likely to draw much attention now that almost a week has gone by.

Of course, I never had any dream that my 9/11 post would get as big as Susan Boyle, or even as big as “United Breaks Guitars” (10 million+ views). I’d have been thrilled if a couple of thousand people read it and a few dozen commented, because I’m just trying to get my ideas into the world, and I’m not using sound, video, or even pictures to do it. I still believe in the power of words.

If you find that either of those posts (or this one, for that matter) inspires you to say something, I hope you’ll share it on the comment page, Like it on Facebook, etc. Meanwhile, I’ll keep sharing my ideas, and hoping they make a difference in at least a few people’s lives.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, People Helping People, poverty, Shel's Personal Life

Guest Post by Steve Jennings

[Editor’s Note: Steve, good and gracious person that he is, sent me an advance copy of this post to make sure I didn’t have any issues with him posting it. I wrote back that I was honored, loved the post, and would welcome permission to use it as a guest post, which he granted. And my life is richer for knowing him, as well. It Unlikely Friends

Sometimes you meet someone and you become instant friends.  That happened to me awhile back.  I went to Massachusetts for some training on media interviews with one of the more brilliant marketing experts in the country, Shel Horowitz (https://shelhorowitz.com/).   He’s the author of Principled Profit, Grassroots Marketing (a must-have for bootstrap marketers), The Penny Pinching Hedonist, Marketing without Megabucks and his latest, Guerilla Marketing Goes Green.  He’s a true wordsmith and a master at getting the most bang for your marketing buck.

The odd thing about our friendship is that Shel and I disagree on a whole host of issues.  Shel is liberal on most issues.  I’m mostly conservative. Our religious views are quite different.  Yet despite our apparent incompatibility, our friendship quickly flourished.

Why?

First, we found our common ground.  Shel and I both believe in leading a simple, responsible lifestyle.  We both enjoy hiking and drinking in nature’s wonders as we go.  We both get riled at the sight of injustice and corruption. It didn’t take us long to find lots of other areas where we agreed.

Second is integrity.  Shel lives what he believes.  He does what he says he’ll do, and he won’t be shy about telling the truth.   I try to be the same way in my life.  Unfortunately, integrity seems to be a dying value in much of our culture.  So when I meet someone who has it, I am drawn to them.

Third, it’s OK to disagree.  We accepted our differences and voiced our positions in friendly, reasonable conversation.  You can’t bring everybody to your side.  Jesus didn’t even reach everybody he came in contact with.  So Shel and I both took time to listen and learn from each other. We didn’t change each other’s opinions, but we broadened our minds.

It’s not hard to get along with people.  Instead of focusing on our differences, try to find some common ground.  There’s more of that kind of real estate than you can imagine.  From that starting point, make an effort to truly listen.  Digest what the other person is saying.  In far too many discussions we humans are guilty of concentrating on how we will advance our position and fail to truly hear the views of the other person.  You don’t have to agree, but you must try to understand.

Yes, Shel and I are unlikely friends. I can’t speak for him, but my life is richer for it.

God’s grace to you,

Steve Jennings, Executive Director

www.TeensOpposingPoverty.org

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

There’s a popular deli and bakery in my area that we’d been patronizing for about 25 years—but I’m not in a rush to go back right now.

Knowing that we were gong to have a series of small memorial gatherings for my late mother (according to the Jewish custom, “sitting shiva”), a friend of Dina’s ordered a bunch of pastries to be delivered to us Wednesday between 3-5 (the gathering started at 7). We were delighted, and made a point of rushing home to be here when the precious goodies showed up.

Except that they didn’t. And at 5:15 p.m., when Dina called to find out where they were, she got a clueless young man who said the delivery driver had already left for the day. “I see your order right here, and I don’t know why it didn’t go out” was about the extent of what he could think of. He implied that he could have the brownies delivered the following day, and Dina told him she expected fresh ones, not those getting stale after never being delivered when they were supposed to.

It didn’t occur to him that he could call somebody to come in and make the delivery. It didn’t occur to him that he could offer any kind of make-good (or even a credit to our friend who had ordered the undelivered merchandise). And it didn’t occur to him that it was the store’s responsibility to remedy the situation—even after some prompting. He told her to call back tomorrow. Dina suggested that it was more appropriate under the circumstances for the store to call us, and he took down our number (after some more prompting).

Thursday came and went with no call from the store. Slightly earlier in the day, Dina called again and was met with a slightly more intelligent person who said she’d been at the store when she’d called the previous day, and that she would make sure the owner took care of it the following morning. I didn’t understand why if there were two people working, one of them couldn’t have gotten the order out to us when we called the first day. And she also told Dina to call back the following day, which got Dina pretty irritated. She told the woman she’d already wasted a lot of time on this and it was the store’s responsibility to call back.

And in fact, the following morning (Friday), the owner called back personally with an appropriate, if tardy, apology and make-good: a full credit for our friend, and a gift certificate (unknown amount) for us. For this reason, I’m not naming the offender. Hopefully, the gift cert will show up in ample time to use for the large public memorial we’ll host in November.

But think about the cost to this store: a number of our friends in the area (plus of course, the out-of-towner who’d given the gift) know which store did this, and will will likely go elsewhere if they need anything delivered at a specific time. And we, quite frankly, will be much less likely to go there at all, despite a relationship of more than two decades. Meanwhile, the friend who placed the order left left a withering review on Yelp, which will haunt the store for a long time to come.

It wasn’t the mistake; mistakes happen. It was the shabby way we were treated once the mistake was acknowledged that left a bad impression, the more so because we are actively grieving the loss of my mother, and it was made clear that this delivery was for a memorial gathering.

Unfortunately, wretched customer service is all-too-common in our society. Business owners don’t realize that these experiences undo a lot of their marketing and a lot of their good will.

Here are three lessons you can take away and implement in your own business, so that you’re not the one getting bad word-of-mouth/word-of-mouse:

  • Make sure your front-line people have excellent customer service skills. It doesn’t take much to be empathic, sympathetic, and show that you’re trying to solve the problem, and failure to do so has negative impact on your business.
  • Train every employeeon how to respond to customer service issues. Our clueless guy should have had a written checklist of what to do, if he wasn’t bright enough to figure it out on his own.
  • Empower your employees to make things right. the cost of a credit and make-good is almost always far less than the cost of lost business and sullied reputation.
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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

My mother died Sunday morning a week after a paralyzing stroke and it’s been a time of NOT focusing on work. She was a remarkable woman who touched many lives. This is the obit that I wrote for our local papers:

Gloria Yoshida, lover of art and justice

SOUTH HADLEY – Gloria Yoshida, of South Hadley, died Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011, at Fisher Home Hospice in Amherst, surrounded by family, after a 12-year battle with cancer.

A native of the Bronx, N.Y., she was born in 1933 to immigrant parents, Hedwig and Fischel Gleich, and worked in print production until her retirement and relocation to western Massachusetts in 2000.

Gloria was a passionate crusader for social justice who desegregated apartment buildings in New York City and attended the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. She was a lover of art and music, exotic travel destinations and good food; an addicted reader, games player and joke teller; and most importantly someone who loved people and still had many friends in her life, from the 1940s to the 11 years she lived in South Hadley.

She was a docent at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, a volunteer at the Gaylord Library, and a frequent auditor of classes at Mount Holyoke.

She is survived by her beloved, devoted husband, Michhiro Yoshida; her son, Shel Horowitz, of Hadley; her daughters, Helen Horowitz, of Denver, and Jeanne Horowitz, of Valley Cottage, N.Y.; her son-in-law, Joe Clayman, of Denver; her daughter-in-law, Dina Friedman, of Hadley; her sister, Elsie Dudovitz, of Chicago; and six grandchildren, Alana and Rafael Horowitz Friedman and Naomi, Miriam, Heidi and Pearl Clayman.

In accordance with Jewish tradition, a graveside service will be held today, Aug. 22. “Shiva” (calling hours) is at the Horowitz Friedman home, 16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, from 7 to 10 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Aug. 22 to 24. A memorial service and celebration of her life will be scheduled in the fall. Her daughter Helen will sit shiva in Denver beginning Tuesday.

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

In the better late than never department, I am finally posting my social media policy. I’ve resisted in part because no matter what I come up with, it doesn’t seem ideal—but when you reach a certain degree of online popularity, a policy really becomes necessary. I currently have 4570 followers on Twitter, over 1200 on Facebook. LinkedIn stops counting at 500, which I surpassed long ago. And I wish I could simply follow everyone back and actually keep up, but I haven’t figured out how to clone myself. I think I’d need at least four of me, just for social media.

In the interest of transparency, I should explain that I dip in and out quickly. Most of my status updates on both Facebook and LinkedIn originate on Twitter, via a Facebook application called “Selective Tweets.” My other participation on Facebook usually starts with following an e-mail notification link to a comment on my wall or a private message. While I’m there, I look around quickly, Like or comment on a few messages, and scan my home page. I interact with LinkedIn primarily by participating in discussion groups.

On Twitter, I tend to follow more links, look for things worth retweeting or posting to my Green and Ethical Marketing pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, check out a few of the latest people following me, and follow some of them. I try to spend no less than 15 and no more than 30 minutes daily on all social media combined.

Facebook and LinkedIn:
On these networks, I accept almost everyone who reaches out with a connection request, unless your profile is empty, you focus on things I find disgusting (sleazy get rich schemes, sexual exploitation, bigotry, ways to fool the social networks—stuff like that). If you abuse the access I give you, I unfriend you—which, fortunately, doesn’t happen often. However, it may not be instant. We do them in batches, and we have found that with Facebook, it’s best not to do more than 20 at a time, so as not to set off their internal alarms. If there are 50 or 60 waiting, it may be quite a while. My VA visits your profile and determines whether you’re a marketer, activist, environmentalist, etc., and sends you an appropriate message that I’ve prewritten.

For both Facebook and LinkedIn, I will open direct messages when I get the e-mail notification—but those notifications don’t always arrive. LinkedIn asks me sometimes several times a week to verify or update my e-mail account because notifications are bouncing. Twitter does likewise—this happens whether I keep the former address or switch to an alternate at a different domain. Yet other times, the mail goes through just fine.

Twitter:
I pay much closer attention to direct messages and mentions/retweets/suggestions to follow me than I do to new-follower notices (which, as noted, don’t always even get delivered). If you @ me with a retweet or an attempt to engage me based on some meaningful connection (NOT trying to sell me something random, which will get you blocked), I will click through to your profile. If I like what I see when I get there, I follow back.

Because Twitter feels so much more personal to me, I’m fussier about who I follow. Your profile has to interest me, and that’s going to be personal, quirky, and in the moment (I might come back a different day and feel differently). But I can tell you a few guidelines:

  • If I notice that your screen name or real name has words like Green, Eco, Enviro, or Peace, I’m likely to click over for a look
  • If your whole screen is just lists of names (such as Follow Friday lists), I am not likely to follow
  • If you live in Western Massachusetts and especially if you use the #westernma hashtag, I’m pretty likely to follow back.
  • If your Tweet stream focuses on something that doesn’t interest me, I’m not going to follow. I once clicked on a follower’s profile to find a very well-done stream all about online gaming. While I admired the quality of his content, I have no interest in the subject and didn’t follow back.
  • If I recognize your name or remember meeting/corresponding with you, I’m likely to take a look.And I confess, I can’t keep up. Whether I visit your profile right away is going to depend on how many other new follows I got since I last checked. If I have 5, I’ll likely visit them all. If I have 30 or more, I’ll scan for people I know, then look for a handful with interesting screen names. If I happen to notice something in your bio about sustainability, social media, or other interests of mine, or if I see a high follower count, I’m more likely to click through.With 3879 people that I’m currently following, I barely glance at the “All Friends” column on TweetDeck. I pay slightly more attention to it than I did before I figured out how to reduce the update frequency. Before that, it was scrolling by so fast I could barely read a tweet, and clicking on a link was basically impossible.

    TweetDeck is my favorite tool for interfacing with Twitter. I use it to manage mentions not only of my twitter handle but also my name and my most recent book title (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), Direct Messages, and a small subset of people that I want to pay closer attention to. I also use it to search, to schedule Tweets ahead, and to keep track of certain topics.

    I do like the serendipity of the All Friends timeline, and therefore occasionally go to Twitter’s own interface to see people I don’t often see (especially if  happen to be on my iPad).

    Is this arbitrary, capricious, and unfair? Yes, I’m afraid so. And I’ll happily entertain any better ideas: post on the comments here, or Tweet me at ShelHorowitz

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

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:

  1. Optimist: “Top of the morning to you, Sir, and if I had a hat, I’d tip it. Thanks for letting me into this beautiful green field with lots of goodies to eat.”
  2. Terrified: “It’s so dark and claustrophobic in here that I’m going to pee all over myself with fear.”
  3. Angry: “How dare you put me in a little box all night!”
  4. Klutz: “Darn it, I closed the door while I’m outside and the peanut butter is still inside.”
  5. Burglar: “Heh, heh, heh, more peanut butter! I’ll just tiptoe in so gently the trap doesn’t spring. I didn’t bring calling cards but, I’ll leave some poop to show I was here.”
  6. Escape Artist: “If I rattle this thing enough, I’m sure I can get the door open.” (We’ve learned that it’s a really good idea to stop what we’re doing instantly and carry the trap outside when we get this type.)

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?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Diversity, Peace and War, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Watching the fireworks from my lawn last night, I found myself thinking about a long-ago July 4th, and how it helped shape who I am today.

The year was 1976. I was a scrawny, long-haired, 19-year-old peace and human rights activist who had just finished my senior term at Antioch College.

I was broke and jobless. And, not having any better plan, I was going to hitchhike around the United States for the summer, shifting my itinerary depending on where the rides were going. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to see Denver and San Francisco, at least, I knew it was a big country with lots to explore, and I hadn’t seen very much of it so far. I didn’t know a thing about hitchhiking, and I hadn’t done any research about what to bring—though I did hook up briefly with a friend who was a very experienced hitchhiker, who showed me the basics of where to stand safely.

So off I went, with $200 in travelers checks in my pocket, and a bunch of inappropriate stuff packed in three inappropriate daypacks. I didn’t have a traveler’s frame pack, a sleeping bag, decent rain protection, a sun hat, or a lot of other things I should have thought about. Instead, I had an entire daypack filled with my creative output: poetry notebooks, my dream journal, and such. Plus a bare minimum of clothing and a bit of food.

I did, however, have a supply of thick markers for making hitchhiking signs that people could read at 60 miles per hour; even back then, I understood some basic marketing principles. 🙂

Setting off from my college town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in late June, I stopped to visit family in New York before heading to Washington for the Bicentennial.

For weeks, I’d been growing more and more disgusted with the insane commercialism around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—stuff like “Happy birthday, America, we’re having a sale on our new Fords because it’s your birthday,” accompanied by various patriotic songs.

I was, at that time, very alienated from mainstream American culture. The United States had finally pulled its last soldiers out of the Vietnam quagmire (which I’d been actively protesting since 1969), and Saigon had fallen only 14 months earlier. Examples of racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression of various minorities were easy to find. Police violence against progressives and racial minorities was a part of daily life, and we assumed we were being spied on.

I’d recently completed an internship at a socialist newspaper in Georgia, where the sense of “us against them” was palpable—and where the advertising base had largely abandoned the paper as soon as a safe, bourgeois counterculture paper started publishing, providing access to the lucrative hippie market around Atlanta without funding anti-government journalism. I saw business as the enemy of progress, and could not have named a single example of a business trying to do good, other than a couple of leftist bookstores and healthfood co-ops. I’d been a vegetarian for almost three years, and had discovered that this made me unwelcome in many restaurants.

In short, I was disenfranchised, cynical, militant, and even hostile. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder.

There were a lot of events in Washington on July 4, 1976, including the grand opening of Union Station as a National Visitors Center, and of course, a huge birthday celebration. As I recall, there were several large public events around different parts of the Mall.

The one I was there to attend was a peace and take-back-the-government rally called by the People’s Bicentennial Commission—and organized, interestingly enough, under the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner that we’ve seen at a lot of Tea Party events in the past few years.

Aside: Columnist Ed Tant, who covered the event for the Athens, GA Observer, remembers the flag as quite integral to the demonstration:

The People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.

The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations…

During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”

I seem to remember seeing it at many rallies over the early 1970s, but it may be that the July 4, 1976 demonstration was the first to make it the rally’s official symbol. Somewhere, I might still have my copy of that button.[Aside ends]

Although some conservatives had worried publicly that this anniversary would be a magnet for terrorism and violence, what impressed me above all was the lack of that kind of drama. Only a few years after hard-hat construction workers had attacked war protestors in New York, after Chicago police had attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention, and after the country had been split into opposing camps on so many issues—multiple large gatherings, each representing a different segment of the political landscape from ultraprogressive to ultraconservative, and a huge apolitical middle that was just there to party out on the Bicentennial, all coexisting. All peacefully listening to their own sets of speakers and performers, sometimes coming into contact with each other at the edges, and even sharing food. As far as I could tell, there was no violence, no overt conflict at all, even as hippies in torn flag t-shirts encountered flag-waving conservatives.

And then, after all the rallies were over, we all left our separate public events and gathered around the Washington Monument—to peacefully watch one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. For one magical night, there seemed to be no great divide. Just a whole lot of people watching a grand fireworks display.

Hitching out of Washington on my way west the next morning, I encountered the generosity of people from both the protests and the parties. I made it back to Yellow Springs in three rides, with very little waiting time. It took only about a half-hour longer than driving would have taken.

And that was the beginning of my summer-long lesson that most Americans are good people who want to do the right thing…that the world is abundant and people will help others when they need it…and that the hostility I thought mainstream America had felt toward the counterculture was at least in large measure, confined to my own imagination.

I have taken the lessons of that day of unity and that summer of hope with me for 35 years now, and I trace a lot of who I am today and how I act in the world to the revelations of that time.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

Havent had time to blog much, because there’s just too much going on at the Horowitz/Friedman homestead:

  • 3 days in Boston because my son had, on successive days, an orchestra rehearsal, his final orchestra concert before they go on tour in Europe (190 high school kids!), and another rehearsal
  • A house concert and -pre-event featuring Swami Beyondananda that I organized and sold out on two weeks’ notice (fortunately, at someone else’s air-conditioned house, since it turned out to be the hottest day of the year), with the Swami sleeping over here
  • My son graduating high school one day after the concert, and the consequent arrival of my father, my wife’s parents (for a three-day visit), and my daughter (my mother and stepfather—a stunning visual artist, BTW—already live locally)
  • The failure of our refrigerator, discovered the morning of graduation (which was the morning after the concert)—and which cost $100 to find out it wasn’t fixable—at six years old! I am still of the opinion that appliances should last 20 years or so, but in the last decade, we’ve had a number of newish appliances fail (grrrr!)

So I think I have an excuse for not blogging over-much lately. Hopefully I’ll get back to normal next week.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Where have I been all week? Researching and writing a new introduction for a book I originally wrote in 1979 (and which in turn was based on a book published by my co-authors in 1969.

Following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, the Japanese publisher decided to bring my ancient book on why nuclear power makes no sense back into print. And the publisher contracted last Friday (one week ago) for a new introduction. My deadline wasn’t until the end of the month, but next week, I’m at a book-industry trade show.

So I shoved a lot of other stuff aside and got it done. It’s a piece of writing I can be proud of, that shows why nuclear makes even less sense today than it did back then (because alternative technologies have improved so much). It makes a strong case against nuclear not only on health and safety grounds, not only about the inability to safely store highly toxic waste for many millennia, but also on economic grounds (a case we hear far too little about).

The publisher gave me a maximum word length of 3500 words; I turned in 3499, not counting the 26 footnotes, many of which came from pro-nuclear sources.

I love coming in early with clean copy that meets the specifications, and I love that I was able to negotiate a much better arrangement than what was originally proposed. And I love letting the supporters of this inane technology demonstrate for me why it should be abandoned.

I’ll try to post an entry or two in the next couple of days before I go away again, and then be back on track the week of May 30.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Marketing, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

It’s been a great discussion the past few days about whether and when it makes sense to work with companies that don’t share your values. I promised to add my own views after we’d gotten some comments, and thus, this post—which I wrote before receiving any of the comments, but chose to hold back on posting:

Here’s my take, as a long-time peace/environmental activist who also writes about how to leverage social change through business. You have these options:
1. Be a purist and refuse any tainted money or tainted partnerships, defining taint to mean that the company is in some way involved in things you disagree with.

2. “Separation of powers,” where you will work with a company that has dirty hands, but only work on the clean-hands aspects of that company.

3. Use the partnership to actively push the company toward more progressive stances, and eventually to abandon the actions that caused you to look askance in the first place.

I’ve evolved on this issue over time. In the 70s, I’m pretty sure I’d have been a #1. And been out in the streets with the protestors. But that was before I saw how the business world can not only change itself, but become a fulcrum for change in the wider society. These days, I’m at least a #2 and when possible, a #3. I’m even in dialogue with an outfit that does seminars for utility companies—and I told them I would not assist with anything that promoted nuclear (and if they hire me to present, I will definitely be using my bully pulpit to push the #3-style agenda to the utilities attending the conference).

But I do think there might be companies (or governments) whose philosophy is so opposed to mine that I would still be a number 1, still refuse to get my hands dirty.

I also recognize that sustainability is a path, and we are all somewhere on the path. I am not sure you could find a person who is living 100% sustainably. Even my very self-sufficient 90-year-old friend who lives in a mountaintop cabin she and her late husband built themselves, with no electricity or running water, grows most of her own food, and keeps her income below the taxable level—creates carbon emissions with her woodstove.

I think a great example is Walmart. I don’t choose to shop there, because I oppose its policies on labor issues, community development impact, predatory pricing, and a host of other areas. At the same time, I have publicly lauded Walmart, many times, for its groundbreaking, deep, systemic attention to sustainability. And I point out that Walmart is not a company of tree-huggers, but of executives looking to maximize profit. I’m willing to publicly praise Walmart’s ability make and save boatloads of money through enormous initiatives to use less energy and to introduce organic foods/green products to customers who would *never* set foot in a Whole Foods–even while choosing to put my own shopping dollars elsewhere.

I discuss this kind of conundrum a bit in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

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