The Washington Post reports that the never-finished, never-operated Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant, in Hollywood, Alabama is for sale at the bargain-basement price of $36.4 million. It has cost more than $5 billion to build as much of it as Tennessee Valley Authority managed to complete, so this isn’t just pennies on the dollar. Each penny of the purchase price leverages $137.36 of construction investment—which, if my math is right, works out to a pretty incredible 1,373,626.37 percent return on investment (ROI), if the plant could be amortized that way. Kind of like getting a Ferrari for the price of a Matchbox car (little toys about two inches long).
The unfinished Bellefonte nuke in Alabama is for sale. Let’s have some fun figuring out what to do with it.
Of course, the plant can’t be amortized that way. It was built to turn atoms into smaller atoms and electricity (and, by the way, tremendous waste heat and a whole soup of poisonous and radioactive waste). In all likelihood, the plant will never fulfill its intended purpose. And that’s a good thing!
I want your outlandish AND your practical ideas. Please submit one of each as a comment on this page, in this format: Outlandish: (describe your idea in one to three sentences). Practical: (describe your idea in one to three sentences). Also please tell me how you learned about the contest so I know whom to thank. If you wish, you may link to a page giving more details. Each entry must include both categories (and the link to your posting address or Facebook screen name must function, so I can contact you if you win).
Oh, and comments are moderated, so don’t even bother posting racist, sexist crap or unrelated commercial spam. It won’t get posted and it WILL get you reported and blacklisted.
All entries must be received by 11:59 PM Eastern Time, Thursday, October 20, a bit over a month from the day I post this.
Want to be a winner? Make your Outlandish entry very humorous but not offensive. And make your Practical entry eco-friendly and specific. For instance, it’s not enough to say “a renewable energy project.” I want to know the type and why it’ll work there.
The winner in each category will get a 30-minute consultation with me to discuss any aspect of marketing, green/social entrepreneurship business profitability, book publishing, or green living–and a copy of my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (acclaimed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, and others) as well as my ebook, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle. Total value of the prize is $135, which is as close as I can come to the amount of construction cost each penny covers. And you’ll be in a press release I’ll send out announcing the winners.
I am the judge, and I’m not responsible for lost or misdirected entries, I assume no liability, blah blah blah (standard contest disclaimers).
Vermont’s first-in-the-nation GMO labeling law went into effect this week. I consider that a very good thing, far superior to the kludged-together industry-giveaway federal version currently under discussion in Congress.
But it got me thinking about the promise the food industry made when GMOs were first surfacing about twenty years ago: genetic engineering would enable agriculture to reduce or eliminate pesticides and herbicides.
There probably are good uses for very careful deployment of thoroughly tested GMO experiments. Janine Benyus, in her wonderful book Biomimicry, discusses some of the possibilities. But so far, we’ve been sold a false bill of goods.
This is the latest lie in the chemicalization and commoditization of the world by some of the most powerful corporations in the world. And it’s been going on a long time.
Commercial farm. Photo by Jose Conejo Saenz.
I’m too young to remember Edward Bernays’ 1929 mock-feminist “Torches of Freedom” campaign to get tens of thousands of women smoking, or the claim in the 1950s that nuclear power—one of the nastiest technologies ever foisted on us—would generate electricity that was “too cheap to meter.”
In perhaps a different category is the claims of the “Green Revolution” advocates of the 1940, 50s and 60s that chemiculture was the only way to solve world hunger. This is different because…they probably believed their own message. It wasn’t a lie; it was the truth as they knew it then. Now we know that long-term chemiculture kills the soil, and thus reduces fertility overall. We also know a lot more about how to grow better quality, higher quantity organic foods.
Unnecessary Obsolescence
There’s a related but different type of false promise: the idea that a certain technology will make your life better, and will be there when you need it. Too often, however, the products are wrapped up in pressure to upgrade, and then upgrade again.
Now, I don’t object to upgrading a product so it only runs on new hardware, as long as the old computer will continue to run the new version. As an example, the 2011 version of Microsoft Office has a much better version of PowerPoint than the 2004 version I run on my nine-year-old desktop Mac. That’s OK; I’m willing to do all my slide creation on my newer laptop.
But I do object—I consider it immoral—that Skype, Dropbox, and GoToMeeting (to name three) have yanked away the ability of perfectly good older machines to even run their product. GoToMeeting, which long ago stopped running on OS 10.5 and older Macs, now requires either the Yosemite or El Capitan operating systems. There are very good reasons not to upgrade an older, slower Mac to these versions; I only did it a few weeks ago after upgrading my hardware with an 1000 gigabyte drive and extra RAM. Luckily, the upgrade was completed before I was leading a webinar over that platform. But I was pretty shocked when I needed to test a microphone with that platform and determine if the problem was in my computer or in the new mic. I tried to run a GoToMeeting test with my wife’s OS 10.8 laptop. No go.
If we don’t have all the features, so what! We didn’t have them when we bought our machines, but we had a working program. If they won’t provide technical support, oh, well. By this time, we should have figured out how to do what we need to do. Why should something that runs perfectly well on older hardware be sabotaged by its manufacturer to force a hardware upgrade?
As an environmentalist and a frugalist, I want any product I buy to last as long as possible. It’s better for the earth and for my budget. When companies stop allowing perfectly functional software to work on older platforms, they kick themselves out of a warm and sunny spot in my heart.
Platform entry gate on the Shanghai Metro (courtesy of Wikipedia)
[This is the first of three observation posts about China. In the coming weeks, I expect to also look at westernization/managing rapid growth and dissent.]
On our recent trip to China, we explored three different cities by underground rapid transit. Shanghai and Xian call their system the metro, while in Beijing, it’s the subway.
By any name, the train system is a wonder. Signs and recorded announcements are bilingual and clear, all the exits are numbered, the trains are fast, frequent clean, and quiet—and crowded.
Xian has only two lines, in part because several digs to expand the system have unearthed archeological treasures. It will have three more in the coming years. Shanghai and Beijing have many more.
In cities as large as these (8 million to 25 million), keeping people out of cars is very much a public good, Traffic congestion is already a misery, as is pollution. Plus, rapid transit is far more environmentally benign than transporting even 1/4 as many via private cars. In other words, the more people can use the trains, the better it will be on the street. Thus, it’s no surprise that the trains are very inexpensive, and cover a lot of ground. The zoned systems cost just 3 yuan (about 40 cents) for the shortest distance in Beijing and Shanghai and only 2 yuan in Xian; in Beijing, at least, much of the city core seems to be in the first zone. A ride all the way to the Shanghai airport costs 7 yuan. Regular commuters can get reusable fare cards and pay even less.
In Beijing, the system extends some 30 or so miles out to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace, perhaps even farther in some directions. The maximum fare of 10 yuan is based on a distance of 92 to 112 kilometers; the airport train costs 25 yuan (about USD $4).
Advertisers are likely to be a factor in the low cost; they monetize their captive audiences; Shanghai and Beijing are the first subways I’ve ever encountered that redesigned the standee straps to fit ads, and also project ads on the walls of the tunnels as the trains pass through. Oddly,Shanghai had no ad placards in the usual place between the doors and the ceiling, though Beijing did.
To board a train, first you get your bags screened by the first of many security people you’ll encounter, then select the destination line from an electronic system map. At that point, you choose Chinese or English; select your station and number of passengers, insert your money, and take your farecard. Hold it over the turnstile sensor, enter, and either feed your ticket back to the turnstile or scan it (if you have more fares left) as you exit. Once on the platform, confirm the direction by checking the strip maps on the platform, which clearly show the stations yet to come.
On all three systems, at least some lines wall off the tracks from the platform, like an airport tram or an elevator (see picture above). Doors open in the wall when a train is docked. I was puzzled at this at first, as it seems an unnecessary expense and complexity. But then I thought about what rush hour might look like in a city of 24 or 25 million residents. With the walls, not only is litter eliminated as a safety hazard, but no one can fall or be pushed onto the tracks. However, in Beijing, several lines use open platforms, and their cars seem newer, so this experiment may be proving less-than-successful.
Western cities don’t face quite the daunting challenges of these megacities—but congestion, pollution, and resource use are definitely factors for urban planners. Here are a few principles they may want to borrow from the Chinese:
Make the line user-friendly to both locals and tourists—use clear signage
Keep it as affordable as possible
Keep it clean (all three systems were spotless, and we’d often see cleaners working the platforms)
Design the routes to bring people to the places they want and need to go, and run the trains often enough to keep up with demand
Label every exit not only with street names (useless to visitors, for the most part) but also with a letter or number; then locals can give directions that begin with the right exit number.
It’s worth noting that Shanghai also has a very high-tech ultra-high-speed magnetic levitation (MagLev) train, which costs significantly more to use and apparently takes a great deal of energy to run. Top rated speed is 430km/h. We saw it from the highway, but were never in a position to try it out. You can take it from the airport for 50 yuan (about USD $8).
Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)
After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.
Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.
Why? Because:
We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.
I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!
Leslie Hinkson: If we want real desegregation, we need to not only make sure black and white kids attend the same schools, but that they interact socially within the school.
Bill Miller: To deal effectively with homelessness, first get people off the streets and into housing. THEN start addressing the other pieces, like jobs, addictions, etc. And this is good for the community, even the business community.
Amanda Herman: Making films “focusing on what people wish to happen, in their dreams. What is it to make someone else’s dreams come true? I gather with people to transform their ideas into public arts projects…The outcome of each project is joy…What’s possible and impossible in the world is largely a social construct. It’s up to us to redefine what is possible…and make it happen.
Darby Dyer: Despite 100,000 objects between the sun and Jupiter, our risk of being hit by the kind of cataclysmic asteroid that may have wiped out the dinosaurs. And the sun will keep producing energy and light for the next 5 million years or more. We are the “Goldylocks planet,” with perfect conditions to support human life. But even if we don’t have to worry about the planet surviving, we do have to worry about human survival. Catastrophic climate change is real, it’s here, and our window for addressing it is shrinking.
Nick Cummings: A recent high school graduate who has faced disability-level breathing problems since birth, he shared insights on being social when you don’t fit in, and on overcoming the depression of being different: “DON’T think the answer is in a pill or a bottle, unless that pill is made of chocolate and the bottle is Mr. Bubble bubble bath…Find the positive in every situation. Take all that raw emotion and have it drive you to be better…We’re all gloomy depressive messes some time. But there must have been something so fantastic before that to make you feel that way. A roller coaster doesn’t only go up.
Laney Rosenzweig: If we can replace the images we have of traumatic events (often with metaphors), we can reduce the post-traumatic stress. Our memories are not fixed, but fluid, and we can create memories of traumatic events that we can live with, that don’t trap or paralyze us.
Thom Fox: As a former drug abuser and gang member, “I’d been on my way to being dead…Life doesn’t have to be miserable. If you don’t like your life, change it. I understood that I could reach out and they’d be kind enough to help. No one succeeds alone. Once you get through hell, you can help one person, two people. That could be exponential and change the world. The more opportunity you create for others, the more you create for yourself.
“The one commonality for all the bad things that happened to me—was me. That’s what I had to overcome.
“Tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s with. People are like tofu. Surround yourself with potential, and it will be fulfilled… One person changed my life. I’m passing that on exponentially. What if your conversation was that one thing that changed their life?”
Angela Lussier: “When I graduated, I thought I had to abandon the artist in order to become a business person. What I realized is I can be an artist and a business person. Even stuffed celery could be an art project…I did a video, with sliding down slides and swinging on swings. I thought, is this something business people do? But the response was, ‘we had so much fun watching you have fun as you taught business principles.’
“The difference is my mindset. I was really outcome-focused at the beginning. Today, I have a creator’s mindset, more focused on learning and growing—the journey. The creator’s cycle: Being–>Dreaming–>Doing–>Making–>Being (reflect on what happened/worked: what happened, what didn’t, what am I scared of). The moment we want to quit lies right before the doing stage. When you move from ‘this won’t work’ to ‘let me just try this,’ a lot of things happen.
“When I figured out that I’m a weird person, I found out everyone else is too; we’re all just pretending to be normal.”
Several other speakers were also on the program, and they had good insights as well—but the notes I took on their sessions don’t lend themselves to reportage. Here are their storyboards (all prepared in real time by the graphics agency Collective Next).
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
What does that mean? Hundreds of thousands of vehicles “partying like it’s 1959,” belching unmitigated particulates into the air that you and I breathe. There were no emissions requirements at all in 1959, in case you were wondering.
This is outrageous! In addition to the recall and the fines, I think this is grounds for a widespread boycott. Being not just lied to but poisoned by a major company that pretends to care about the environment is not acceptable behavior. We as consumers need to stand up and say, ‘ENOUGH!”
And we consumers have power. There’s a long and honorable history of boycotts sparking change in corporate behavior. Just ask Nestlé.
The above link is to the New York Times article, but this act of deeply purposeful criminal fraud is all over the news media. This link goes to a Google search for “volkswagen defeat device emissions.” As of 6:09 p.m. Eastern on Friday, September 18, Page One results include stories in NPR, the Washington Post, and USA Today in addition to the Times.
I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.
She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.
Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.
And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)
Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.
However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.
Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.
Dialing for dollars doesn’t always work. But dialing to convey important information does.
Most of the time, robocalls are used all wrong
I once wrote, “If you are trying to sell me something, or if you want my vote, I want contact with a human being who can answer my questions.” Yet I get robocalls all the time from clueless “marketers” who don’t understand this simple truth, or can’t be bothered with it. Worse, a lot of these calls are hangups, and far too many show up in the middle of the night. Would it be so difficult to program a function that blocks each area code between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m, local time? It won’t help cell-phone travelers but it will help a lot of home-based entrepreneurs who don’t always remember to turn the bedroom ringer off at night.
I have one message for these cretins:
–> Stop spamming me. I don’t buy from spammers.
I’ve spent years preaching the gospel of client-centered marketing. Marketing should be driven by the customer. You want to be found when the prospect is searching for great content about what you do. You want to be ready when that client calls or emails. But you don’t want to be spamming the prospect with canned, inflexible messages. It doesn’t work in social media, it doesn’t work in e-mail, and it doesn’t work on the phone.
But that doesn’t mean the technology should be tossed out. There are times I actually welcome a robocall, and other times when I tolerate them:
These robocalls are welcome:
From a school where I have a child enrolled, or the one where my wife works, announcing a closing or delay
From my town or state government, warning of a road closing, water service issue, etc., or giving polling hours for an election
From my utility company, updating me on a storm-related outage
From one of my credit card-issuing banks, flagging potentially fraudulent activity and offering to connect me with a human being if there is an issue
And these I’ll grit my teeth and tolerate:
A healthcare provider confirming an appointment
A business that I regularly patronize, announcing a special time-limited offer and giving me a reason why it can’t wait for me to check my e-mail
A reminder that an online or in-person event I’ve signed up—and especially one that I’ve paid for—is about to start
Notice a pattern? What do all of these have in common? I’ll skip a couple of lines so you can take a guess before I tell you.
Figure it out yet?
Here it is:
These are organizations with whom I have an existing relationship, using the tool to convey crucial information. They are not interrupting my day—or worse, my sleep—to sell me something. They are not horning on on me and forcing a relationship where none exists. The ones I welcome are telling me something I need to know; the ones I tolerate at least tell something they need me to know on the basis of our past interaction.
And that should be your guideline in using any intrusive marketing (or informational) method.
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Daily_Eagle2.jpg
We have a kilowatt of solar electric on the roof of our 1743 colonial farmhouse. But a few years ago when the October Blizzard knocked out our power for three days, we couldn’t tap into that solar.
