Category: Uncategorized

By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Uncategorized

You’ve got to wonder about marketers who send those horrible emails where everything is in 8-point type all jammed on the left side of the page and completely unreadable. I own a one-trick-pony software app called SmartWrap that is designed to strip out all the > characters and bad line breaks in multi-quoted e-mail–but it’s also very useful for converting those scrunchy e-mails into something my 49-year-old eyes can handle. If only it supported the page-down key, I’d be all set.

As for my own newsletter prep: I do three monthly newsletters, all in plain text, none of them with pix. I could probably increase deliverability by posting the whole thing on a web page (we do archive them later, but only the main articles) and sending an email with a URL pointer–but I think the higher deliverability would be countered by the lower readership, especially as two of my newsletters target the frugality market and therefore can be expected to have higher-than-usual percentages on dialup.

When I was on dialup, pretty much the only outfit that got me to click to the web was MarketingSherpa.com; now that I’m on broadband, I’m considerably more willing.

However…as a recipient, I loathe HTML, find that in 98% of newsletters with graphics, the graphics are unnecessary–I keep them turned off, so for the most part, I don’t even see the “pretty” pictures–and 3/4 of the time I do turn them on for a particular newsletter, I wonder why they bothered.

As for PDF as an attachment versus a webpage, I’d let it be the reader’s choice. But I do remember that PDF downloads on the web were very annoying when I was on dialup–attachments were better, but only if they weren’t too huge. If a lot of readers are on dialup, it’s probably better to format a page in HTML and send a link. Or just post on a blog!

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Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

BBC/The Guardian Investigative reporter Greg Palast first broke the story about the disenfranchisement of over 90,000 heavily Democratic Florida residents of color prior to the 2000 election–without which Gore would have been the clear victor and thus become President.

Now, he tells us that the GOP around the country systematically sent do-not-forward letters to the home addresses of soldiers stationed overseas who lived in mostly black, mostly Democratic precincts, and then when they came back as undeliverable, challenged these soldiers’ right to vote. Also targeted: residents of homeless shelters.

There’s quite a bit more, but here’s a little excerpt:

What about black soldiers? Here’s what they did. They sent, we found out – here’s now what we’ve just found out. They sent first-class letters to the homes of African-American soldiers shipped overseas. They wrote on the envelopes “Do not forward. Return to addressee.” Well, of course, they’re shipped overseas, so the letter can’t be forwarded, to Baghdad or Germany, or wherever. Letters are sent back to the Republican National Committee, filtered back out to the state committees, and then elections officials are told, ‘These people don’t live at that address. We have evidence that they’re falsely registered.’

Now, here’s the trick. You send in your absentee ballot. That is a great act of faith, probably the greatest religious act of faith since Moses walked across the Red Sea, you know, hoping that he wouldn’t get drowned. You just mail in that ballot, and soldiers – this is, remember the Republican Party made a big deal about Al Gore complaining about soldiers’ illegal absentee voting. These people knew that these soldiers couldn’t defend themselves, would not know that their ballot would not be counted, would be challenged. And there’s no way, I mean you could – from Baghdad you can fight George’s war, but you can’t fight for your ballot – massive, massive, nationwide challenge.

In places like Wisconsin, by the way, we’ve just discovered – How did they even know how to challenge these people? They were using Blackberries loaded with the names. This is one expensive multimillion-dollar operation, and by the way, Amy, it’s illegal, okay? One of the reasons why the Republican Party didn’t ‘fess up when we showed them the sheets and they said, ‘Oh, it’s donors,’ is that if you target black people, or Jewish voters, as they did in a few districts, because that’s a democratic demographic, if you challenge these people, that’s against the law. That’s against the voting rights act of 1965. It’s a felony crime, you know.

WHY do we still let these thugs and crooks stay in office?

Aside: Isn’t it ironic that Palast, an American, works for two of the most well-respected British journalism outlets. Why won’t any major US media hire him? His website and books are accessible to us, though.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Uncategorized

You must have heard this one by now. Company after company is involved in schemes to make their executives rich by issuing stock options after the stock price jumps, but backdating them to appear that they were issued before the rise.

Option timing abuse first came to light earlier this year after a number of media reports questioned why executives had exceptionally good luck in obtaining stock option grants just before large increases in the related stock price. Erik Lie, a University of Iowa finance professor issued a study that claimed as many as ten percent of all option grants appear to have been backdated. A similar Merrill Lynch study found that 40 companies in the S&P 500 likely backdated their options.

Hey, people–if you already know that insider trading–buying or selling based on information you have that will affect the stock price but isn’t yet public–is enough to go to jail, surely it should occur to you that this sort of thing is essentially insider trading coupled with outright fraud.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Uncategorized

A UK trade weekly for lawyers, Legal Week, has a wonderful article encouraging businesses to base their policies not merely on compliance with ethics laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and its non-US equivalents, but on creating a culture of ethics that far exceeds the legal minimum.

When we focus on compliance alone, we are setting the bar too low. Adherence to the regulations becomes an acceptable standard to work to and we make it difficult for employees to deal with issues not covered by the rules. Something more holistic is increasingly required.

If we move the focus towards ethics and the need to change behaviour, we are inevitably required to humanise the subject matter and begin to introduce a context to the content. Properly built and implemented ethics education becomes about being part of a better business, about improvement and moving towards something.

Oddly enough, the author, Chris Campbell, cites a tobacco company as a positive example. To my mind, there’s nothing ethical at all about selling tobacco–but certainly the principle holds.

He proposes three questions to evaluate any action:

. are my actions potentially open to misinterpretation?

. are my actions likely to negatively impact others? and

. what will I be required to do as a result of my actions?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

Bruce Funk was just trying to do his job! The County Clerk of Emery County, Utah for 23 years, Funk was locked out of his office and forced to resign. Why? Because he had the temerity to question whether the Diebold voting machines his county had purchased were accurate, and brought in an outside expert who in fact verified that the machines were highly manipulable and had insufficient backup.

The initial thing that led me to getting a hold of Black Box Voting was that when I re-examined the machine, I found a number of them with insufficient backup memory, some as little as four megabytes, whereas a normal machine had anywhere from 27 to 29 megabytes…

Something was worked out that if they could terminate me as the election official of Emery County, then they would recertify the machines. And so they changed my locks, effective April 1, and locked me out of my office.

This is an outrage! There have been so many election irregularities in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections that there has been a cloud of illegitimacy over the GWB administration from the beginning (a cloud made darker by the consistent misbehavior of this administration once it got into office: a sordid history of vindictive reprisals, lavish favors to friends and special interests, not just a reluctance to hear criticism but constant attacks on those who criticize, and so forth.

And yet when an a election official who has very good reason to be concerned–who knows that the backup memory is inadequate if, for instance, the plug gets knocked out of the wall socket–asks an expert to investigate, he loses his job.

Is this the America that claims to be a beacon of democracy around the world?

Shameful!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

This is too weird: The New York Times went back and forth with senior General Motors executives about a letter to the editor from a GM vice president, attempting to rebut a highly critical article by Thomas Friedman. The letter said accusations in the column were “rubbish”; the Times refused to allow that word in the letter.

Writes the PR guy, Brian Akre,

Now, you’d think it would be relatively easy to get a letter from a GM vice president published in the Times after GM’s reputation was so unfairly questioned. Just a matter of simple journalistic fairness, right?

You’d also think that the newspaper’s editing of letters would be minimal — to fix grammar, remove any profane language, that sort of thing. Not so.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

Speculation about this on the SF Chronicle blog–from a commentator who thinks the Bush administration has done a good job on corporate crime (a premise with which I strongly disagree)–but his lawyer friends who actively cover the trial think it’s a real possibility.

It wouldn’t shock me–I don’t think he’s been that concerned about his legacy, as the rampant cronyism that’s been all over his administration demonstrates.

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Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

The US House of Representatives struck a major blow against our Internet freedom the other day, voting for the so-called Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006.

This disastrous bill, if also passed by the Senate, would take away the principle of “Net Neutrality”–that every website gets to load as fast as the server can manage and be found as easily as it shows up in the search engines. A vast coalition of 752 groups on both the left and right joined forces to block this bill, but the House passed it 321-101, including 92 Democrats.

Contact your Senators NOW and speak out against this bill–or face a world in which not the government but big telecommunications corporations effectively decide which websites you will see, and promote the sites that pay them the most. The Internet has been the backbone of the independent press, one of the last bastions of people unafraid to tell the real news. We must protect our rights to view these sites, read these blogs, watch these videos–and if content providers have to pay for the privilege of having their sites accessed, that channel will dry up mighty fast. Our browsers will be sold to the highest bidder, and that will not be the alternative voices.

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Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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

Responding to a post by Ed Smith on the Self-Publishing Yahoogroup about whether blogs are worth it:

Hi I am considering putting a blog on my website with the objective of
increasing visitors to my site. I am aware of the costs to set it up,
but I am concerned about the amount of work involved in keeping it
spam free and on target. It sounds like it is a lot of work that has
to be done on a daily basis. Could those of you who run blogs on
their websites, give me your opinion as to it being worth the time you
are putting into the blog. Any thoughts about do’s and don’ts
regarding setting up a blog are welcome as well. Thanks for your help.

I spend one to two hours a week on my blog, which I host on my own site in WordPress and also keep a mirror hosted on Blogger–probably average three posts per week. Some of these posts I also copy to my AmazonConnect blog, but very few. I spend far more time posting here and other lists. Been doing it for a year and a half, and what scared me off for so long was the idea that I needed to post every day. Of course, you’ll get better results the more often you post.

Some advantages:
* It’s really true that blog posts seem to get into search engines faster
* A post of mine got referenced by Slate.com and I saw a nice traffic spike
* Some of the posts only take five or ten minutes–a paragraph or two, and a link
* One of my long-time goals is to be a syndicated columnist. Last year, I took about six of the longer and best thought out pieces and repackaged them as sample columns. I sent to four syndicates. All said no, but at least I wasn’t creating the articles from scratch!
* I have a small but dedicated following, a few of whom (including at least one listmate) have signed up for e-mail notifications
* Sometimes I can repurpose content–this post, for instance, will make a nice blog entry
* Of course, it’s more links inbound to my site (from the Goggle-owned mirror on Blogger and from anyone referencing my post)
* It seems to add to my credibility when I tell, for instance, reporters that I’ve been blogging on business ethics for over a year

Definitely offer the option of e-mail feeds and XML feeds, and definitely use pingoat.com to tell the world when you update.

As for comment spam, yes, I’ve experienced it. I turned on word Verification on Blogger, and turned on pre-approval on WordPress. No spam gets through, and when someone tried to hammer me on WordPress, I just bulk-deleted all their attempts.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Uncategorized

Just after Enron’s Skilling and Lay are found guilty, a paper in Alberta, Canada, accuses the company of using Alberta as a testing ground for the shenanigans that created havoc in California’s energy market.

It’s been shown that Enron grossly inflated power prices in our province. Apparently this ploy was given the code name, Project Stanley, derived from the name of our top hockey trophy.
Although a probe into Enron by Canada’s Competition Bureau in 2000 found no fault with the corporation, new evidence has reportedly surfaced, showing that there was bragging within its walls about how it had artificially driven up electricity costs in Alberta.

Meanwhile, The Economist reports,

A court in Seoul sentenced Kim Woo-choong, the former boss of Daewoo Group, to ten years in prison and ordered him to forfeit 21 trillion won ($22 billion) for his part in South Korea’s biggest corporate scandal. Mr Kim, who founded the chaebol in 1967, was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement. Daewoo collapsed in 1999 with debts of $80 billion.

Daewoo was once the most prominent of Korea’s industrial giants.

Meanwhile, a Hong Kong newspaper offers a general challenge to the long-held culture of family controlled business in Hong Kong and China:

Overdone patronage begets corruption, begets poor business culture, economic waste, social dysfunction. Getting rid of the patronage system has clear benefits for all and managerialism can in some cases undermine the worst aspects of the family-run model. But, like all coins, this one can be flipped. On the other side are the lessons learnt from the US shareholder model which provide specific warnings.

But the paper warns that the Enron verdict proves the corporate model favored in America…

can be just as arrogant and irresponsible as the most parochial family business. The bottom line is that the shareholder model as practiced in the United States is no bulwark to an elitist, irresponsible and corrupted cabal of managers ascending to a position of omnipotence and over-riding due process, ignoring the law, and marginalizing the standards of ethical business practice.

Meanwhile, an Australian blogger reports on a telecommunications stock so shaky after corporate scandals that shareholders tried to unload their stock on eBay!

As scandal after corporate scandal was revealed, all leading straight to the CEO’s large, but mostly unused desk, calls for his head were answered with his sacking. Used to years of bad results the shareholders – by now nearly 70% of all Australians – welcomed the news, but when he was awarded a $50 million payout, it was the final straw.

And one final meanwhile, here at home, wrangling continues over whether the FBI had the right to raid the office of a sitting Congressman accused in a bribery investigation. Frist says the FBI was justified; Hastert and DeLay say they overstepped. And just to show that the GOP doesn’t have a lock on ethical failure, the representative in question is William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana.

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