Category: Shel’s Personal Life

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

Rule Number One of my approach to marketing is to treat the customer right. As I say in my books, it’s far cheaper to bring back an existing customer than to have to go out and recruit a new one. And even in the following case, where there is no likelihood of a repeat purchase, it still would have made more sense to honor the request. A business owner never knows when a customer will tell a very large circle of people about either a good or a bad experience. And in this particular case, I’m prepared to escalate and the merchant may find itself with neither the money nor the merchandise, just for being stupid about customer service.

For right now, I won’t name the company; we’ll see what kind of response I get. But here’s a letter I wrote that I should never have had to write:

On January 12, 2010, we purchased two bags at your Lincoln Mall store in Miami Beach, a few minutes before closing time. We came into the store because my wife needed a replacement for her everyday purse. She found one that was a little larger and considerably heavier than her current purse, and I found a fanny pack, which I’d been looking for. It wasn’t ideal but she thought she could make it work. However, walking the few blocks back to where we were staying, it became obvious that the weight would be a problem. We actually took turns carrying it, and she decided we’d bring it back the next day.

The purse never left the [name of store] plastic bag. It was exactly as it had been when we took it out of the store. But when we returned the next evening, the store refused to refund her purchase (we’re keeping the fanny pack). They pointed to the sales receipt, which stated that all returns would be for exchanges, not refunds.

However, this information is not posted anywhere in the store. There is no way to know about the policy until after you’ve made the purchase and the store considers you bound by it.

As it happens, I’ve written several books on marketing, and while not a lawyer, I have at least a basic understanding of consumer law. One of the requirements of a valid contract is that it’s entered into voluntarily by all parties. In this case, the terms of the contract were essentially changed by one party after purchase. The standard for American retail is to take back unused, salable merchandise within a reasonable time after purchase, and where the conditions are different, they need to be visibly posted so the customer is aware. Handing someone a sales receipt with different conditions is not something likely to hold up to scrutiny.

However, the store did not accept this argument and refused to issue a refund; we spoke to four different people. We did look around to see if here was anything else we needed, but we had come to the store specifically to buy the purse, and couldn’t find anything else even remotely suitable.

I am writing to you because I’d rather we work this out as reasonable people. We were only visiting Miami Beach and have left the area, so we can no longer bring the item back in person. However, we would be glad to return the bag if you refund our purchase price ($29.95 plus $2.10 sales tax, total $32.05) and issue a prepaid call tag from UPS or any other carrier. We will not pay to ship it back, since it was not our fault that the store refused to take it back when we went in person.

I’m sure we’d both rather avoid a credit card chargeback, and therefore, a refund is the better path.

Thank you,
Shel Horowitz

I’ll let you know what happens.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

It started our first Chanukah in our “new” home–the 1743 Colonial farmhouse we bought in 1998. For the first chunk of my kids’ lives, we lived close to the center of town, a dense and fairly urban residential neighborhood. Then we moved to this ancient and wonderful home on a working dairy farm (my hard-working neighbors have 400 cows).

We lit the candles and each put our menorah in a different window. And then one of the kids asked, “Can anybody see our candles from the state highway?”

Our house is a block back and up a hill. At that time, there was only an open pasture between us and the main road. We piled into the car and made a circuit. Our house was visible, but it was pretty hard to tell there were candles in the window.

But once we were out there with our coats on, someone got the bright idea to walk around the house and look at all four menorahs, singing “Oh Chanukah, Oh Chanukah.”

Since then, we’ve walked around the house, singing, eight nights a year: four humans who live here, one dog, and whoever happens to be visit and is not too infirm. Sometimes it’s been so icy we needed ski poles. Sometimes we have our whole Chavurah (circle of friends) each with a menorah and there are dozens or hundreds of candles, depending on how far into the holiday we are (you add a candle each night). Sometimes it’s been sleeting.

Last night, the first night of Chanukah this year, was clear and cold. The constellations were incredibly clear, and one planet hung just over the mountain behind our house. I had left my glasses inside, because it was cold enough that I wore the hat I’d bought in Russia that I can’t wear if it’s above 20 degrees F, and wrapped a scarf around my face—and I knew the glasses would steam up. And yet, the stars were still fabulous.

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

Thirty-one years ago, the housemate with whom I’d found an apartment moved out, and I invited a poet friend of mine to take his place. We shared that apartment for several months, until he, too, moved on, and another friend moved in.

Today, I went to see that poet friend for the first time since around 1980. We’d been completely out of touch–but about a year ago, a mutual friend tracked my wife down on Facebook. Turns out that mutual friend also convinced my old housemate to join Facebook, where we found each other a month or so ago.

The friend who moved in after him stayed in that apartment after I left, but later moved to Vesey Street, two blocks from the World Trade Center. It was a primitive form of social media that let me know, finally, that she was OK, two weeks after 9/11.

And there are a number of others.

I remember very clearly the first time something like this happened: AOL was still my Internet portal, so that fixes it somewhere in 1994-95. All of a sudden I got an e-mail from a high school friend. Tom and his wife Liz came up to visit (we live four hours apart), attended my wife’s book party in New York, and have generally reentered our lives. As have Lew and Katherine, the friends who connected us with my old housemate. A few months ago, they moved up from New Jersey to two towns away from us in Massachusetts; we hadn’t seen them since a falling-out somewhere around 1989. Now, we’ve seen them several times. In fact, we’re seeing them tomorrow.

Oddly enough, when I’ve searched for old friends, I haven’t had much luck finding them. But quite a few have found me.

I’ve forged or deepened many connections via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other communities with people I hadn’t known before–but those reconnections from 20 or 30 years in the past are particularly special.

(A slightly different version of this article was published on Technorati under the title Technology Helps Me Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past.)

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

Inspired by a Tweet from Susan Harrow, I’ve decided to post my Twitter policy every once in a while.

Some of this may sound harsh. Please keep in mind that as a somewhat public figure, I am absolutely bombarded with messages not only on Twitter but through many other channels. I have to cope with about 300 emails on a typical day, plus a three-inch stack of postal mail, plus the 1454 people I’m following on Twitter. 2390 are following me, and I recognize the disparity—but I also do have a business to run, a family to be with, and a physical need to be off the computer for half an hour or so after I’ve been on for about an hour.

I did seven Tweets outlining my policy, and I think they’re worth repeating here (slightly modified with the benefit of “but I MEANT to say” hindsight and spelling out the contractions/not needing to cram it into 140 characters):

1. I don’t follow you just because you follow me (on Facebook and LInkedIn, BTW, I pretty much do). I check out a few each profiles from new followers day (somewhat randomly, but if your follow notice includes a keyword I pay attention to—see #5, below—it ups the odds substantially). If your feeds interest me, I follow. I don’t unfollow you for not following back, since I followed you in the first place because I found your profile interesting and not because I expected reciprocity. And I don’t track whether or not you unfollowed me; it doesn’t matter in the way I sue Twitter unless you’re someone I have an actual friendship with.

2. You can drastically increase odds that I follow back by sending me an @ (NOT a spam), naming me in #followfriday, or Retweeting me; this will get me to look at your profile .

3. Having watched with horror as spammers killed e-mail, I zealously protect Twitter as useful tool. Spam me and I make it public/block/report. (I will tolerate a clueless auto-DM when I follow, unless it links to something scummy. If your auto DM or an @ message sends me to a game-the-twitter-system-get-more-followers site, porn, dating or gambling site, I’m gone. If you did it as other than an auto-DM on follow, I report and block you too.

4. The first time your account gets hijacked and you involuntarily spam me with “join my mafia family,” I cut you slack and tell you I’m not interested. If it happens again, I assume you’re not smart enough to change your password and that spammers will bother me through you. At that point, I block you.

5. I tend to follow: Green/eco/ethical, soft-sell marketers, book publishers and authors, social media people, folks into progressive social change, quoters, people who post interesting links, people who tweet leads from reporters looking for sources. If you fall into one of these categories and you @ me telling me so, I’ll certainly click on over for a look.

6. I always like to say that I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything, but don’t forget the almost part. If you have a great profile about stuff that I’m simply not interseted in, now matter how good it is, I won’t follow. A few subjects I find uninteresting: online gaming, hard-sell interruption marketing, get-rich-quick stuff, football, super-techie computer coding…and schemes to get more followers you haven’t earned.

7. I tend to follow people who offer a mix of glimpses into their personal lives, interesting tidbids they find online, dialogue with the community, and no more than 20% blatant promotion. And I try to keep my own Tweets in this pattern. I try to be helpful, friendly, useful in my Tweets. Follow me because you like my posts, not to game the system with one more well-connected follower.

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

If you don’t count my toddler rebellion against smoking at about age three, I’ve been an environmental activist for 37 years. And yet the Green Work conference tomorrow in New Haven is only the second actual environmental conference I can remember speaking at (I did speak at a couple of anti-nuclear events in the 1970s, but the emphasis there was on protest, not learning).

Anyway, I’ll be speaking at 3 pm on marketing your environmental commitment, and exhibiting both at Green Work on Friday and at the folk festival/Green Expo on Saturday. Say hi if you’re in the neighborhood.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Who knew? The tomato blight that’s been ravaging organic farms and gardens in my area of Western Massachusetts has been traced to starter plants apparently grown originally at one location in the South, and shipped to some of the big-box suppliers like Wal-Mart.

I know at least three local farms growing tomatoes in commercial quantities that have no crop this year. Thousands of infected plants had to be destroyed. At least one of those started their own plants from seed, and yet was done in by blight spreading from infected plants grown far away form the local ecosystem. And of course, organic farms can’t, by definition, use chemical fungicides.

Just tearing out our half-dozen rotten, smelly, toxic plants and doing our best to dispose of them properly was a job and a half. I can’t imagine dealing with a whole field’s worth.

In 2007 and 2008, we averaged about 1600 tomatoes, with a taste that simply cannot be equaled with commercial methods. This year, we managed to harvest *one* San Marzano before the blight set in. We still have a few from the hundreds that I dried last year, but not having fresh tomatoes is a huge disappointment. Still, I count my blessings. Compared to those who farm for a living and/or supply CSA members, we had a lot less to lose. Farms are faces losses of thousands and thousands of dollars.

The sad thing is, the farms hardest hit are those with a commitment to local, sustainable agriculture–tainted by other companies’ reliance on non-local, centralized systems that allowed this nasty disease to blanket the Northeast all the way out to Ohio.

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

This is something I’ve been struggling with pretty much since I joined Twitter over a year ago: how do you let people know you appreciate what they’ve done without filling up your Twitter stream with posts that are of low value to other readers?

Yes, if they’re following you, you can send a DM (Direct Message). But if they’re not, you have no choice but to post in the public stream. Because I don’t want my page to be dominated by what-should-be-private thank-yous (I hate it when I visit someone else’s page and see 70% of the Tweets are thank-yous, and I don’t choose to follow those people), and because when I’m thanking for retweets (reposting something I’ve posted, so their own network sees it) or Follow Fridays (nominations of cool people to follow) it’s generally a mixture of followers and non-followers, I’ve tended to send a group thank-you to everyone at once (which is very easy to do on TweetDeck). I don’t always know who is in each category, and it’s certainly frustrating to try to DM someone only to discover they aren’t following you.

I don’t send a thank-you for following me, because I don’t see auto-DMs as adding value very much of the time, and with over 2000 followers, it’s not practical to send real individual notes. But I do like to say thanks when someone retweets or nominates me as a cool person to follow. And yet, if my stream were filled with personal thank-yous to those not following me, the stream would become boring and people would stop nominating me.

Today, I logged on to find that someone had criticized my group thank-you practice, in both an @ reply (public) and a DM (private). He didn’t feel the group thank-you was sufficiently personal. And he’s right–I’ve never felt the solution was ideal.

So I wonder…what IS the ideal way to handle this? How do YOU balance the need to be personal with the need to deliver high value in a Twitter profile? I’m eager to hear your comment either below or on Twitter @ShelHorowitz .

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

One of the fun things about social media marketing is that you rub shoulders with other social media marketers, and there a bunch of smart folks with lots of good ideas. I’m always in learning mode, and a lot of my consulting practices synthesizes a gazillion bits I’ve picked up from a book, blog, teleseminar, lecture, or even a Tweet.

During my rather frequent travels, I’ve often put in one or two blog posts, but usually from some Internet cafe or library on the road. Watching Chris Brogan continue to keep his blog active during vacation with a bunch of preloaded posts, I decided to do that as well. After all, why spend my travel time looking for WiFi? Chris is posting pretty much daily. I’m not as ambitious as he is–but this is one of three posts that will appear over the next ten days while I’m off on the West Coast.

Hopefully it’ll work. The last time I preloaded a post, which was not for a vacation but to coincide with a blogosphere event, I had to go in manually and publish it.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Been spending some time on Huffington Post this morning, always a fascinating place. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley on Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s plan to derail health reform. What he doesn’t talk about is single-payer, which I believe could engage the strong support of the American people and roll right over all the roadblocks put there by industry lobbyists–while piecemeal “reform” would gain no such support. I do not understand why mainstream Democrats aren’t pushing this issue. It’s key to a raft of economic boosts that would help, for instance, both US automakers and labor. It’s little-talked-about that because most governments around the world, at least in developed nations, provide a real health care service, foreign competitors to GM, Ford, and Chrysler aren’t stuck with that enormous cost.

Robert Borosage on the general climate of business corruption in Washington. And on how that corruption has caused us to fail in such areas as mandatory sick leave, which then in turn makes the “stay home” response to swine flu impractical for those at the bottom of the ladder, who might lose their jobs and would certainly lose their pay.

Apparently some right-wing pundits have nothing better to do than attack Obama as elitist because–are you sitting down?–he likes Grey Poupon or Dijon mustard on his burgers! Give me a break! You can buy the stuff for two dollars a bottle at a discount store, and it sure does taste a lot better than the yellow glop that’s largely turmeric. I say unto them: get a life!

Stephen Colbert’s very funny video spoofing the big too-big-to-fail bailouts; no commentary necessary from me

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Although I’m a strong advocate of same-sex marriage, and have attended a number of gay and lesbian ceremonies long before they were legal in any U.S. state, I am very disturbed by a ruling of New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission that a photography studio, Elane Photography (owned by Elaine Huguenin and Jonathan Huguenin, was not within its rights to decline a job photographing a same-sex wedding. (That link is to the NPR story–scroll down–and in the midst of the coverage is a link to download a PDF of the actual decision.) And the photography studio is to pick up $6,637.94 in plaintiff’s legal fees!

The decision quotes the actual e-mail correspondence, which was civil, measured,not the least bit threatening, and simply stating that the couple did not choose to photograph same-sex weddings.

When someone contacts me regarding my copywriting/consulting services, I send back an e-mail response that includes the following:

Please note that I reserve the right to reject a project if I feel I’m not the right person for it. This would include projects that in my opinion promote racism, homophobia, bigotry or violence–or that promote the tobacco, nuclear power, or weapons industries–or if I do not feel the product is of high enough quality that I can get enthusiastic about it.

In other words, I am putting out my values and stating clearly that I will not accept projects in conflict with my values. I have in fact occasionally turned down projects because they were promoting causes I actively disagree with. And in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I even have a section called “When to Say No to a Sale.”

While the values of these photographers are not my values, I think they, too, should have the right to turn down projects that violate their particular beliefs. I feel this on both ethical and practical grounds: the truth is, when someone takes on a project in conflict with deep internal values, that person won’t turn in good work.

I support their right to not be hired to perform their art for a cause they disagree with; this is not a public accommodation, such as a restaurant or hotel denying service. It is not a job discrimination issue, but a self-employed couple in the creative arts choosing not to be hired by a prospective client.

It would be a sad day indeed if someone were to compel me to write propaganda for, say, a homophobic organization, or a company whose primary product is nuclear weapons.

I don’t know if there’s any appeal process for the New Mexico board, but I certainly hope there is. Something is very definitely rotten in this decision.

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