Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Shel's Personal Life

July 16, 2008, Guatemala City

I am sitting three rows behind the President of Guatemala, Álvaro Colom,
watching an interpretive performance of Mayan dance and music in a
courtyard in the national palace.

A few hours ago, I was in this same spot, getting a tour of the palace’s
public areas. I saw the chairs and instruments and wondered when the concert was going to take place, and what it would be–never dreaming that
I’d be sitting in one of those chairs, watching this wonderful spectacle
that night.

The president impresses me. He greets a few people, then sits in a reserved
seat in the front row, but not on the dais. Following the performance, he speaks humbly and from the heart, without either a script or a TelePromTer–and he speaks as one human
being to another, not as a polished speaker. He speaks of his personal
experience in the woods 30 years ago, and how this gave him a strong
appreciation of the need to conserve both nature and the Mayan culture, and
he keeps his remarks brief.

The event is a celebration (in Spanish) of land conservation and cultural tradition, and
I´m there because we happen to be staying with the Superintendent of
Guatemala’s 18 national parks. He and his family are new to Servas (the
international homestay network we’ve participated delightedly in for 25 years), and this was arranged with the local
coordinator without us knowing anything about him. We are this family’s
very first Servas travelers.

I like Luís immediately when he picks us up. He greets us warmly, cracks
jokes the whole time we stay with him, and gets into discussions of deep
political and environmental issues. And he’s totally patient with our
less-than-perfect Spanish (he doesn’t speak English).

The next day, we’ve come to have tea with him, his wife and daughter (both
named Edith) in his office, and he says, “I’m going to a meeting tonight at
the National Palace, and
the President will be there. Would you like to attend?”

“Yes, thank you. May I borrow a jacket from you?”

“You won’t need one. It will be informal.”

Of course, of the 400 or so people in attendance, the vast majority,
including Luís, wear suits. But there are 30 or 40 others in more casual
clothes, fortunately. By happenstance, I went out the door in the morning
wearing a button-down shirt and long pants, while Dina wore a longish
black skirt and a solid-color blouse–but it could just as easily been a
t-shirt and shorts. Luís actually tried to take us back to his house in the
afternoon to have dinner and change, but traffic was so bad he turned
around and went directly to the palace.

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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 Copywriting, Other, Shel's Personal Life

Blog: Absurdist Packaging
I’m writing this aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to L.A. Literally moments before beginning boarding, they announced that the supposedly included meal wasn’t free in the coach section. Hmmm–why didn’t they tell me this three days ago when I requested a vegetarian meal? Or even when I’d arrived at the gate with plenty of time to go find a restaurant.

I’m generally not a lover of airplane food, and I certainly wouldn’t pay for it. So I rushed out to the concourse and grabbed a bag of overpriced trail mix.

I’m one of those people who actually reads packaging. It’s an old habit; according to my mother, I taught myself to read before I turned four, using cereal boxes and mayonnaise jars. And since I’m a marketing copywriter, it’s actually a work-related distraction.

And I’ve long been amused by some of the idiocy that’s written on America’s packages. This little bag of trail mix is a prime example:
The second ingredient is peanuts and the fourth is cashews (or so they claim–I haven’t found a cashew yet. But just below the ingredients list are three absurd statements (capitalization and spelling are exact transcriptions of the original):

1. “This product ingredients are from: USA, India and/or Africia and/or Vietnam and China.” Why don’t they just come out and say “we don’t’ know where this stuff is from, and we don’t care.” And where the heck is a country called Africia? Well, at least they didn’t put an apostrophe where none belongs. Instead they simply left it out, along with the s that should follow at the end of “product.”
2. “ALLERGEN INFORMATION: It contains undeclared tree nut traces.” What on earth is an undeclared treenut? One you smuggle through customs? I mean, it says right on the label that there are cashews, even though none exist. Seems to be this is a case of declared untree nuts, or falsely declared tree nuts, or something like that.
3. “PRODUCT PRODUCED IN A FACILITY THAT PRODUCES PEANUT PRODUCTS. MAY CONTAIN PEANUTS AND NUTS.” Well, hello there. Peanuts are the second ingredient, remember? And I can see them through the window in the front of the bag. Tree nuts would be nice. I love cashews. I don’t much like *raw* peanuts, however, which is what’s mostly in the bag. Oh well, at least they did roast the soybeans, thank goodness. Soy, however, is not mentioned in the allergen section.

Am I snarkier than usual today? Airplanes will do that to me. Especially when this whole situation came about because they lied when they told me I got a meal.

(Postscript: my little bag of trail mix was so unsatisfying that I ended up breaking down and buying an airline meal. My choice was a hummous platter with decent hoummous, pita brushed with balsamic vinegar, and a whole bunch of raw veggies, most of them of reasonable quality. So I have to eat a least some of my words about airline meals.)

(I wrote this a few days ago on my way to Los Angeles–and then forgot to post it. I’m still there.)

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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 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, Media Ethics, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Just stumbled across a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant and bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, on the ethical issues he faces as a journalist who also writes books and also gives speeches. Among other things, he notes the latitude he has as a staff writer for the New Yorker compared to the extremely narrow ability to express any opinion he faced at his former employer, the Washington Post.

As a PR writer/consultant, speaker, journalist, book author, and webzine editor with a specialty in the intersection of marketing and ethics, I grapple with these issues every day. and I found myself not only agreeing with almost everything Gladwell says here (amazing considering the piece is four years old), but wishing I had written it.

Gladwell turns out to be quite good at defining his bo8undaries. An example:

On behalf of the business side of the New Yorker, I have repeatedly given talks or presentations to representatives of companies that advertise with the magazine. For some of those presentations, I have been paid. And on a number of occasions, those groups have included people from the U.S. automobile industry. Has that biased me in favor of the Big Three? Well, no. As I’ve stated, last January I wrote an article bitterly attacking the SUV, which has been the cornerstone of the financial success of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past ten years. Giving a speech does not buy my allegiance to the interests of my audience. Why? Because giving a paid speech to a group for an hour is simply not enough to create a bias in that group’s favor. It’s a very different sort of transaction. I’m not invited to speak to those medical groups because I promise to agree with their position on health care, and I’m not invited to speak to groups from Detroit because I promise to agree with their position on SUVs. In fact, my position on health insurance or SUVs never comes up. I’m invited because those audiences want to hear about my work.

I say Bravo, and I recommend the piece highly–with the caveat that (like many great articles in the New Yorker) the piece is quite long and you’d be better off hitting the print button.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life

Grrrr! If you think e-mail is reliable, you’ve just been lucky so far. The only way you can know for sure that e-mail has reached its destination is if you get a response. Nothing else is sure–and people don’t realize this!

For several years now, I’ve encountered increasing difficulties in getting mail through. For a while, I couldn’t even e-mail my own mother! More of a problem–I had a client in Poland where e-mail between us was so unreliable it ended up causing them not to work with me anymore.

Far too much legitimate mail is undelivered, filtered to trash, or simply lost forever. And I, for one, am totally sick of it.

Today, I tried to respond to someone who had answered my note about a possible speaking gig. It was blocked, with a 550–we-think-this-is-spam-so-we’re-not-going-to-send-it message. And yes, I plugged it into one of the popular spamcheckers and got a clean rating. At least this time, I actually got notified that my mail wasn’t going to leave my server (this doesn’t always happen). Then I copied the entire contents into an attachment, deleted the text, and added one line about why I was sending an attachment–and that was blocked! I will have to call my recipient on Monday

Yet somehow, even though probably at least 5 percent of my totally legitimate inbound and outbound mail never arrives, I get at least 20 up to 100 or more total crap junk spam jobs every day: “Nigerian scam” letters offering to pay me a percentage of some huge transaction…messages about account security from banks I’ve never done business with….offers to extend the size of various body parts I may or may not happen to have…procurers of various mind- or body-altering chemicals, legal or not.

Why in heck can this total crap clog up my mailbox while the real stuff is blocked?

It’s time for a movement of resistance. E-mail is extremely broken and it needs to be fixed. It was at one time the most effective means of communication ever devised, and it’s dying a long slow death.

Let’s take it back! If we can send astronauts to the moon, surely we can figure out a way to block the real junk and let through the real mail. The automated tools don’t work. I’m tired of having my business interfered with by floods of junk mail and blocked real mail. I’m tired of spending huge amounts of time and effort trying to get blocked e-mail to go through, and more time deleting all those spams. I’m tired of my ISP deciding what I can and can’t read, and guessing wrong all the time. I’m tired of challenge-response systems that put undue burden on their correspondents. I’m tired of spam-filter solutions that work for a year or two and then get completely bollixed up. I’m tired of having to send only a teaser about my newsletters and forcing my readers to click to the web. I’m tired of missing important mail that does get to my inbox, but doesn’t get seen because too much garbage piles in on top of it.

And I’m wondering if it’s time for some kind of mass movement or campaign to members of Congress (or the national legislature that governs you)–or SOMETHING!

P.S. In my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, I have a section called “Spam: The Newbies’ natural Mistake,” in which I demonstrate mathematically that spam is a really bad idea from the spammer point of view as well as from the user. https://www.frugalmarketing.com/shop.html

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

Throughout history, far more lasting, positive social change has been accomplished through

nonviolent (though often massive) organizing than through coups, violence, military dictatorships of the left or the right.

Need examples? Just in my own lifetime, there are many. A few to tickle your memory:

  • The US Civil Rights movement
  • Abolition of apartheid in South Africa
  • The Solidarity movement and the dismantling of the entire Soviet empire
  • Getting the US out of Vietnam

    The skills involved in this kind of organizing are not necessarily intuitive, and if you only look at traditional history sources, they aren’t well documented. However, plenty of people’s history exists, and numerous courageous individuals have spent their lives studying these skills, and building them in others.

    I didn’t know Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Dorothy Day–but I have been fortunate to know personally some of the leaders of this movement. The late Dave Dellinger was a personal friend for a few years. And I knew George Lakey and Stephen Zunes when I lived in a nonviolent study and action community in Philadelphia. Stephen and I even collaborated as the principal authors of a paper on future directions for the peace movement.

    I bring this up not to name-drop but to be able to speak from personal experience that these are people of very high integrity.

    So I was a bit shocked to get an e-mail from Stephen calling attention to criticism he and Gene Sharp (author of the definitive analysis of nonviolent social change, The Politics of Nonviolent Action), and others. Apparently, they are being targeted by certain elements of the left who sees them as tools of imperialism–including Hugo chavez of Venezuela.

    Stephen has posted a long rebuttal to this absurd claim on the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

    Stephen points out that the consulting he and other nonviolent activists do focuses on helping democratic opposition to totalitarian groups favored by US government interests, and not on destabilizing governments the US doesn’t like. In fact,

    …The only visit to Venezuela that has taken place on behalf of any of these non-profit groups engaged in educational efforts on strategic nonviolence was in early 2006 when I – along with David Hartsough, the radical pacifist director of Peaceworkers – led a series of workshops at the World Social Forum in Caracas. There we lectured and led discussions on the power of nonviolent resistance as well as offered a series of screenings of a film ICNC helped develop on the pro-democracy movement in Chile against the former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. The only reference to Venezuela during those workshops was how massive nonviolent action could be used to resist a possible coup against Chavez, not foment one. In fact, Hartsough and I met with some Venezuelan officials regarding proposals that the government train the population in various methods of nonviolent civil defense to resist any possible future attempts to overthrow Chavez.

    • I very much like Stephen’s analogy of nonviolence training and the appropriate technology/green development movement:

    Just as sustainable agricultural technologies and methods are more effective in meeting human needs and preserving the planet than the conventional development strategies promoted by Western governments, nonviolent action has been shown to be more effective in advancing democratic change than threats of foreign military intervention, backing coup plotters, imposing punitive sanctions, supporting armed rebel groups, and other methods traditionally instigated by the United States and its allies. And just as the application of appropriate technologies can also be a means of countering the damage caused by unsustainable neo-liberal economic models pushed by Western governments and international financial institutions, the use of massive nonviolent action can counter some of the damage resulting from the arms trade, military intervention, and other harmful manifestations of Western militarism.

    Apparently, there will be some kind of action campaign in support of Gene Sharp and others. I Not in the article but in the letter, Zunes writes,

    I’ve recently posted an article which critically examines these claims that popular indigenous pro-democracy struggles and Western nonviolent activists who support them are somehow collaborators with U.S. imperialism… Among the things I address is the irony that so many on the authoritarian left ˆ after years of romanticizing armed struggle as the only way to defeat dictatorships, disparaging the potential of nonviolent action to overthrow repressive governments, and dismissing the notion of a nonviolent revolution — are now expressing their alarm at how successful popular nonviolent insurrections can be, even to the point of naively thinking that they are so easy to pull off that it could somehow be organized from foreign capitals. (One would think that Marxists would recognize that revolutions grow out of objective social conditions…)

    Anyway, I will shortly be sending all of you an open letter in support of Gene Sharp and other folks who do this kind of work I hope you will consider signing on to.

    When I get the link, I’ll post it here.

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, General Commentary, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life

    Maybe there’s hope for our society. I stopped into Simply Books in the C concourse of Atlanta’s massive Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, not expecting much. After all, most airport bookstores, and even a lot of chain-owned downtown and mall stores lately, cram their shelves with trashy mass-market novels by the likes of Danielle Steel.

    I don’t mind a good yarn; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, Kite Runner, and even the occasional Stephen King–but when I dragged myself through one of Steel’s, I found it one of the most uninteresting and poorly written novels I’d ever encountered.

    This bookstore, despite its very limited shelf space, was great. I saw literally dozens of books I’d have been happy to read–including some you may eventually read about in my monthly review column. In my brief foray, I saw these among others:

  • Giving, by Bill Clinton
  • Gary Hirshberg, founding CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, writing about socially/environmentally conscious companies
  • The Zookeeper’s Wife, a novelized account of a true family that risked their own lives to hide dozens of Jews in the zoo during the Nazi era
  • About five of Jeffrey Gitomer’s entertaining and acerbic sales books
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns, sequel to Kite Runner
  • Meatball Sundae–the latest unconventional marketing rant from mega-guru Seth Godin

    • It is soooo refreshing to see an ariport store whose buyer values intelligent discourse! (And don’t worry, there were plenty of beach novels, too.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Peace and War, Shel's Personal Life

    When Richard Nixon’s secret list of “enemies” (very broadly defined) became public knowledge, I was much too young and unimportant to be included–and I confess I was a bit jealous of some of my older friends who made the list. And a few years later when I lived with a paid staffer for a leftist peace magazine, we were pretty sure our phone was tapped.

    But I discovered today that I have made it onto at least one more recent enemies list, put out by a Jewish right-wing hate site. 7000 of us, in fact, described by these modern-day McCarthyists as self-hating Jews. The language they use is racist, homophobic, and “my way or the highway.” The list includes celebrities like Woody Allen, most of the famous progressive rabbis I’m aware of, and even the very pro-Israel pundit Christopher Hitchens. My wife, who’s written an award-winning book whose protagonist is a Jewish teen who flees the ghetto of World War II to go live in a forest camp with partisans, makes the list by being married to me.

    I’m rather amazed. I get a whole paragraph about me, while my friend Stephen Zunes, who has published probably hundreds of articles opposing Israel, gets only his name. Stephen and I collaborated back in 1981 on a white paper outlining strategies for the US peace movement. It was never published, but I’m very glad to have gotten a chance to work with him.

    My crime? Saying publicly that I don’t necessarily think the “security fence” Israel is building is such a good idea. Just for the record, this is accurate. I’ve also said that I don’t think much of the similar fence the US is trying to erect to close off Mexico.

    If they’d dug a bit deeper, they might have found out that I spent much of my 20s writing and organizing around Middle East peace issues and have published articles about the Israeli peace movement, and that one of my websites contains several pro-peace articles.

    Fortunately, these people don’t run the wonderfully pluralistic societies of either Israel or the U.S. I shudder to think of what they’d do if they were in power.

    I thought about linking to their site, but I decided that I would not be benefiting the causes I support by giving them an undeserved link from a well-ranked site. Nor do I want Google’s computers to think that I endorse them in any way.

    Speaking of endorsements and link love–I was amused to see that my wife’s mention was linked to the Amazon page for one of my books (I presume it’s an affiliate link)–so these people are not above making a few shekels off the people they despise, although the book they chose to link to is actually out of print.

    I guess I’ll have to start blogging more on Middle East peace issues, in order to properly earn my place on the list (wink)

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