Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People, poverty, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

This time of year, we spend an astonishing amount of time dealing with food: harvesting from our garden, making salads, cooking, preserving, giving or occasionally selling surplus…but it is SO worth it!

Long before we had a garden of our own, I’ve been an advocate of local community food self-sufficiency. Not that a neighborhood or village would grow all its own food, but even the most urban could grow some vegetables and herbs, some berries.

Food is a basic necessity, and as such should be a right (ditto for drinkable water and health care, among other things). But in many poor communities, there are few gardens and not even any supermarkets. Rooftops, vacant lots, and even windowsills could change this—and in the process, empower residents, break down barriers, form friendships, save people money…and introduce folks to the absolute joy of eating fresh organic produce grown right where you are.

Yesterday, I made a batch of pure tomato sauce: no oil, no water, no herbs, no onions or garlic, just fresh ripe garden tomatoes, cooked in their own juice for several hours, until the sauce was about a third of the original volume, and had a flavor so royally rich you’d think it was made of 24-karat gold. Today, it was Dina’s night to cook. Earlier today, she went and got a couple of pounds of green beans out of the garden (along with another 40 full-size and 125 cherry tomatoes, enough corn for our lunch, celery, eggplant, edemame, zucchini, and I forget what else). She cooked the beans lightly for a few minutes in my super-intense tomato sauce and served them over couscous. WOW! Served with a salad of our own cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce from our local CSA farm, plus some Turkish olives and feta cheese, it was a fabulous dinner.

Today, I made another batch of that good sauce (most of which we’re freezing for the winter), a batch of zucchini pickles, and a batch of dried tomatoes. Dina processed the leeks for freezing. I confess, we’re putting in a couple of hours a day. It really helps that I work at home and that Dina doesn’t have to go teach at the university in the summer. Seems like every break I take from the computer I am dealing with food. But come January, when the produce you can buy is almost inedible, we will pull some of our bounty from the freezer or from the dried stash in the pantry, and we will enjoy locally grown meals almost as good as those we’re feasting on now.

It’s an experience that should be shared widely. I feel very sorry for those people who’ve never had a REAL fresh tomato. Comparing it to a supermarket tomato is like comparing a perfectly aged French triple-cream gourmet cheese with Velveeta.

And I feel grateful not only to live in a place where we can have a garden, but in a time when consciousness of local organic and fresh foods is high, and where food is helping people know their neighbors and boost their nutrition.

Yes, a tomato can change the world.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, language, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

My friend Ken McArthur blogged about his internal struggle in not confronting racist remarks from his substitute barber. I gave him this advice:

It’s not too late. Go back and find him. Tell him, in a respectful, not angry way, “Ever since you cut my hair, I’ve been thinking about some of the things you said and how much I disagree with them. I’ve been beating myself up for not challenging your racism when you expressed it. So today, I’m going to stop beating myself up and tell you that I didn’t appreciate your put downs of those who look different from you, and I’ll not have you cut my hair again.” Then stand still and listen for dialogue. It may be quite vitriolic, but you may be able to go deeper. And you owe him that much.

You do this, not for his soul, but for yours. But there may be a side benefit of reaching his, too (maybe not right away).

Thanks for being brave enough to share this post. I look forward to the follow-up post about what happened when you went back. And how lucky you are that you have the opportunity to “undo the not doing.” I can remember a couple of incidents in my teens where I failed to interrupt racism or sexism on the street and never knew the identities, never had the chance to back and make it right. 40 years later, I still feel guilty.

Mind you, I’m no saint. I have successfully confronted oppressive behavior at times, left it unchallenged at times, and confronted the behavior without effecting any change at other times. Once I got an obscenity-laced tirade directed at me by name and religion, and that was scary (she later called up to apologize). But I’ll always be proud of the time I intervened with a child whose mother was about to lose it over his tantrum in the supermarket (I got the kid laughing by quacking at him)–and always be ashamed that I did nothing to intervene years earlier when a man was verbally abusing his girlfriend on the streets of New York.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

Hiking through the rainforest at night in a rainstorm? Are we crazy? Not at all. We had good flashlights and a naturalist/guide, and it was magnificent.

We’re in Santa Elena/Montverde, Costa Rica, and there are several “night walk” tours available. We asked Cristina, the all-knowing, ultrafriendly concierge at our hotel (Claro de la Luna), which was the best, and she told us it depended on what we wanted: popular or quiet. We chose quiet, and we were the only customers walking with Greyving (our guide) through the former Finca San Francisco de Assisi (Saint Francis of Assisi Farm). Arriving just before dark, we were awestruck by the majesty of the tall trees shrouded in mist, the sounds of the many species of insects, the thickness of the understory.

Dozens of mammal, snake, and bird species live in this reclaimed forest, now conservation land: sloths, agoutis, quetzals, porcupines, and monkeys, to name a few. But Greyving warned us that we weren’t likely to see many animals in the rain, and in fact we saw nothing with four legs. But we saw plenty of insects and spiders, including walking sicks, moths, crickets, grasshoppers—and two tarantulas. He was able to coax one of them—an orange-kneed tarantula about six inches in diameter, which he said was a very common type—out of its hole, and it came within a foot of us. I grabbed for my camera but she skittered off. The other one was busy eating, and couldn’t be prodded out of its tree trunk no matter what. But it’s quite something to peer into a hollow log and see these deep eyes staring at you from a twisted collection of black hairy legs.

This was a female, he said. Females live about ten years and spend their whole lives inside one place, in this case a hollow log. Males spend their days walking around the forest, and as a result—being a tasty snack for many of the four-legged creatures here, and also at risk of being killed and eaten by the female following impregnation—live only a couple of months.

We passed an enormous strangler fig that he estimated at 200 years old. And, he says, in the nearby parks there are some specimens five times as large and four times as old.

In all, it was a fascinating hour and a half.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers, Networking, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

For decades, going back to the 1970s, I’ve had two major passions in my life: making the world better (with a particular focus on environmental activism, land-use planning, and the safe energy movement) and marketing/writing. In fact, my earliest published articles were the coverage of peace and environment demonstrations that I wrote for a high school underground newspaper back in 1972, when I was a 15-year-old student. And one of the first articles I sold as a freelancer, in 1977, was coverage of the Seabrook nuclear power station site occupation and the arrest/incarceration of 1414 protesters—including me.

For most of my career, these two passions were both active, but separate. Starting in late 1999, when I formed a group called Save the Mountain to protect the Mount Holyoke Range (near my home in Western Massachusetts) from the desecration of a large housing development, they began to come together. That campaign, running from the housing project’s announcement in November 1999 to our victory in December 2000, harnessed together everything I knew about organizing for social change AND everything I knew about marketing. And also taught me how much I still needed to learn, as we had people in our large group who knew far more than I did about such tactics as lobbying government officials, working with lawyers, and successful visibility marketing.

I wrote about that campaign in my 2003 book, Principled Profit, and I also included sections on various Green visionaries and the kind of world I want to live in. And I began to discover that there were plenty of other people like me who shared those two passions of Green and marketing. This really accelerated in 2010, with the publication by a mainstream house of my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson). All of a sudden, I’m finding Green marketers everywhere—and most of them feel very alone.

As carbon footprint, global warming (what an innocuous name for such a dreadful phenomenon) and similar issues have finally reached a critical mass to come into mainstream consciousness, the time seems ripe to move our threatened planet forward. And marketers have to be there, leading the charge, marshaling public opinion, and moving from consciousness that we need to save the planet to actually doing it. I envisioned an organization that would not only provide support to each other, but stake out advocacy positions that would enable governments, businesses, nonprofits, and the public to go more Green and do it faster.

Getting this right will take some thinking and planning, and I hope you’ll weigh in with your ideas. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you more. Meanwhile, if you’d like to be on the notification list, you can leave your e-mail address on the “coming soon” website I’ve set up.

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

150 words a day for seven days. I can do this!

When Michelle Shaeffer first told me about Jeannette Cates’ Blog 30 Challenge to write 30 posts in June, I decided not to participate. It was already a week into the moth when I learned about it, and I knew that with my sister’s family of six coming for a week, I was going to be way behind (and in fact, my inbox ballooned by 1000 unread e-mails while they were here).

Jeannette has set up all sorts of systems that build on this commitment to get more traffic, Twitter fans, etc., and I was disappointed that it wasn’t going to work for me.

But now they’ve gone home again, life is getting a bit more sane, and Jeannette just announced a more do-able version: 7 posts in 10 days. Except that 3 of the 10 days are already gone, so for me, it’ll be a post a day for a week. Or two posts today while I’m in the groove :-).

I think I’m going to use these seven days as a laboratory to explore my next big project: a trade association for Green marketers. Stay tuned—and PLEASE comment on the ideas I’m exploring. If I find your comment especially useful, I’ll even send you a nice surprise.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

It’s been quite a week for family milestone events.

The Reunion
By coincidence, my wife’s 35th high school reunion was the same evening as the day we crammed our new-college-graduate daughter’s gear in our little hatchback and delivered her to New York for the summer. Since we were in town anyway, we decided to splurge and head on over.

Although we didn’t know each other then, Dina and I actually attended the same high school, but I was two years ahead (in my yearbook, there’s actually a picture of the two of us next to each other Read more »

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

Copywriter Ryan Healy had an interesting post today discussing the reasons why people unsubscribe from his blog. Not surprisingly, many had to do with e-mail overload. But quite a few had to do with Ryan’s openly conservative Christian mindset.

I’ve been reading Ryan’s stuff for a couple of years now, and I’m very far from either conservatism or Christianity. But I still read him. Here’s the comment I posted on his blog that explains why:

I get some posts like those as well. And Ryan, while you and I are poles apart politically (I think Obama has sold out to the conservatives), and while I do consider myself a person of faith, I don’t happen to be a Christian, or particularly religious. But for me, those are not reasons to unsub. You always keep a civil tone, and I think core disagreements force me to rethink my positions, justify them to myself, and sometimes find them wanting and shift. If you were nasty about it, that’d be different. (I don’t read much of Dan Kennedy anymore because he’s way too shrill in his conservatism. I do read Clayton Makepeace, and have even contributed a few articles to his conservative news site as “The Unabashed Progressive”–but I tend to turn off when he goes political).

Anyway, in spite of my ultra-crowded in-box, I’m continuing to read your stuff even as I’ve cut back on a lot of others 🙂

And I love both your commitment to ethics (which I share) and your copywriting/marketing smarts.

I trust also that if you read my blog, you wouldn’t be turned off by the unabashedly progressive positions I often take.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Cooperate with others to open new markets. It’s one of the key principles of my brand new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), released this week by John Wiley & Sons. The book is a manual for thriving by doing the right thing, showing businesses that Green and ethical practices aren’t just a way to stay out of jail–they’re a success strategy–and cooperation is one of those practices.

So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book:

  • We chose to partner with Green America for the launch. We are donating a portion of proceeds, and they have spread word of our book to their 94,000 members.
  • We solicited other partners who will tell their following about the book–and we gave them two powerful incentives: the chance to build their own lists by submitting a bonus, and to promote an upsell product that pays commissions.
  • With these partnerships, we’re able to offer anyone buying the book this month a package of extra worth well over $2750 (and still climbing)–AND to reach at least 702,000 people who are on the lists of these partners.

    So…adding Jay’s lists and mine together, we have about 94,000 subscribers. Adding Green America alone doubled that. Adding in the partners means we multiplied our original 94,000 by about eight times, to 890,000. Even chopping off ten percent for duplicates, that still means 801,000 people are hearing about this book, and that’s 703,000 people that Jay and I couldn’t have reached on our own. And that doesn’t even count Twitter, e-mail discussion lists, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

    Oh yes, and let’s talk about my bringing in Jay as a partner co-author. Leveraging the strength of his name definitely helped to build all these partner relationships, as well as strong partner relationships within the publishing house. So now, instead of reaching 10,000 of my own subscribers to inform them of my newest book, I’m reaching 801,000, of whom 791,000 are the result of our outreach efforts, outside of my own network.

    Cost to me? Only time. OK, quite a bit of time, including my assistant’s time, which I am paying for. But time well-spent.

    Is it resulting in sales? A week ago, the Amazon sales rank for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was in the 575,000s. In other words, five hundred seventy five thousand books were outselling mine.There have been some wild swings, but at the moment, it’s at 28,793. In the environmentalism category, it’s #13 right now. And Amazon is only one of the five channels that we’re linking to from the books website, https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com. In other words, yes–people are BUYING the book, and in doing so, validating this key concept.

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

    Visiting my father in Florida, we treated him and his ladyfriend to lunch on fashionable Ocean Drive in Miami Beach’s South Beach deco district. Lots of lessons here on how to deal with a saturated market.

    First of all, almost every restaurant (and they are numerous), not only on Ocean Drive but on several of the surrounding streets, like Lincoln Mall and Española Way, hires shills: people to stand outside, engage anyone walking by, and try to get them to stop and eat. Most of the restaurants have at least one, some have several (for the most part, pretty young women, many with European accents. I guess it must be effective, but after a while, it feels like running the gauntlet.

    Second, recognizing that the consumer benefits from comparison shopping, many of the establishments print up postcards with their (for the most part very similar) offers. To us as consumers, this was very helpful, because after walking three or four blocks along the strip, we had a basis for remembering which ones had seemed like the best choices (and in fact returned to one to actually eat on the basis of the postcard).

    Third, when you’re doing popular loss-leaders, you make up the revenue in other ways. We were offered $4.95 breakfasts and $8.95 to $9.95 lunches all up and down the street. The food was actually quite good—but a simple cup of tea was $3.50!

    Finally, one to avoid: unpleasant surprises. When we were seated, the shill had told us she could to the advertised prices or 20 percent off the specials on display. My father asked the price of the steak special: $65! “I didn’t want to buy the cow,” he said, ordering instead one of the $4.95 breakfast deals: a huge omelet with meat, cheese, and vegetables.

    We saw this same strategy in some of the retail shops, where some items were really, really cheap, and others were wildly overpriced a shelf or two over.

    On the steak dinners, I imagine a fair number of people order one of the displayed specials without bothering to learn the price, and suffer major sticker shock when the bill arrives (or maybe after the drink specials, they’re too gone to notice). Considering that the same restaurant is using the same term to describe both its loss-leaders and its top-line offerings, I think this could be a disaster. It doesn’t strike me as a good way to make up revenue. In a crowded market, the last thing you want is a customer loudly arguing about the bill, especially in an open-air café that faces directly out on the street. Yes, of course, there are many places where you can pay $65 for a steak dinner and feel fine about it, but those are not restaurants that get you in the door on the basis of a $9.95 entrée. Different market, different clientele, different expectations, and no price resistance.

    Interestingly, our dinner choices for two of our three nights were restaurants with no shill. In both cases, we had excellent, reasonably priced food, and the place was certainly busy enough.

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