Category: Uncategorized

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

My 19-year-old niece, Miriam Clayman, made aliyah yesterday. In other words, she emigrated to Israel and as a Jew, instantly became a citizen.

Unlike the US, which seems to be hostile to immigrants these days, Israel actively recruits and encourages Jews from around the world to make aliyah, and honors them when they arrive. Unlike the US, where immigrants must find their own community and must struggle silently with homesickness and unfamiliar customs, in Israel they get language immersion and the resources of a grateful government.

As a marketer watching part of the welcome ceremony in Israel (on replay), I was struck by how well Israel does its marketing and branding for this project.

Instant Community

It’s quite remarkable to me that this group of 127 olim (people who have made aliyah)—strangers when they arrived at the departure ceremony in New York just a day earlier—had clearly formed a community as they flew through the night to their new lives. And this was deliberate.

Israel’s government and business community joined to make sure the olim felt welcome; you could see it in a dozen little touches, such as:

  • The special “aliyah plane” with its festive logos
  • The super-symbolic disembarkation on to an old-fashioned stairway to the tarmac, instead of a soulless mechanical jetway to an anywhere airport lounge
  • The ceremony with numerous dignitaries, including the minister in charge of resettling immigrants
  • The video feed of the entire event, plus commentary, footage from inside the plane, footage as the olim stepped off the plane, etc.—broadcast live to the eager family and friends around the world, and available for replay as a powerful persuasion tool

The two olim selected to represent the group and receive their certificates in front of everybody, shake hands with and hug the dignitaries, etc. happened to be my niece and  her boyfriend, Ben Yablon, who met  as gap-year-in-Israel students last year. Their love story is apparently quite appealing to the media; they had already been featured in a big article in a major Israeli newspaper and a radio interview last week.miriam and ben Yediot Achronot

Imagine starting life in a new country as an honored and welcomed community member whose new country is excited to receive you—imagine your own perception, and the perception of your friends and family back home, that you’ve finally “come home.”

Marketing by forming communities is certainly nothing new. Companies like Harley-Davidson and Apple  have built their whole brands around it. It’s part of why social media marketing has taken off. It’s part of why smart marketers often stage events. But rarely does a whole country say, “we’re so glad to have you as part of our community.”

The Wider Context

Of course, Israel’s welcoming committee has a lot of the groundwork already done. The new immigrants have already embraced Israel and the idea of an ancient Jewish homeland that has risen again. Diaspora Jews of European origin often feel a stronger pull to Israel than to the actual country where their parents or grandparents grew up. Jews in the US, at least, are often raised with intense loyalty to Israel; the idea of being pioneers building a new country is very strong even among American Jews who have no intention of actually moving. Even the Passover seder ends with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

And let’s not forget the wider regional context. Israel is not popular with its neighbors. Many in the region and around the world consider it a pariah state. And unfortunately, acts of violence and oppression on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have fanned the flames of this hatred. Both sides have rejected real opportunities for peace over and over again. Israel was founded in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as an almost utopian society, full of rhetoric of optimism and equality—and some of the people who were present at its founding are still alive. But the reality has not always lived up to the rhetoric.

It is worth asking what kind of reception do non-Jewish immigrants receive in Tel Aviv. But it’s also worth looking at the whole concept of building community, not just for a brand, but for a nation, as some of the most powerful marketing possible.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, poverty, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Today, I am proud to be an American.

When I attended my first same-sex commitment ceremony, sometime around 1980, I never thought I’d see so much progress, so fast. In 1982, I went to the first LGB pride march in Northampton, Massachusetts—and some of the marchers wore bags over their heads to protect their idenities.

In 2005, just 23 years later, my own state of Massachusetts became the first to legalize same-sex marriage. And now, with today’s Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay marriage, several major ripples happen:

  • California will likely become the 13th state to legalize marriage equality, and that will mean about 30 percent of the US population will live in a place where partners of the same gender can marry
  • The wretched DOMA, the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (I prefer to call it the Desecration of Marriage Act) is invalidated, and the numerous discriminatory practices it enshrined are nullified—creating economic equality for same-sex relationships in such matters as inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and spousal benefits (DOMA is the worst kind of compromise—the kind that makes no one happy)
  • The US is well on its way to joining the 14 other countries that have legalized gay marriage, and thus joined the 21st century on this issue: not just the progressive hotspots of Northern Europe, but even two countries in South America (with Brazil expected to join them soon) and one in Africa

So what does it mean? Living in a state where same-sex marriage has been legal for 8 years, I can tell you that it has broken down a lot of barriers. When people realize that the same-sex couples in their community are just neighbors, working with them on the block beautification committee or school parent association—struggling with the same issues, sharing the same triumphs—a lot of the prejudice goes away. Just as we’ve seen a huge change in relations between races after the legal apartheid of the segregated south went away, we’ll see a gradual dissipation of prejudice as people of different sexual orientations rub shoulders in multiple contexts.

Congratulations to the Supreme Court, to all my lesbian and gay friends, to the Obama administration that urged this decision—and to my country.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

I’ve been debating with a couple of nuclear apologists on Twitter this week, following my public celebration of the permanent closing of San Onofre’s twin nukes.

My German correspondent Rainer Klute sent me to a very interesting article in Forbes, “How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt?”

The article made quite a number of valid points, including the very high death toll from unregulated coal in China—something that could be slashed quite easily just by adopting US pollution standards.

But when I got here, I had to wonder what the author had been smoking:

The dozen or so U.S. deaths in nuclear have all been in the weapons complex or are modeled from general LNT effects. The reason the nuclear number is small is that it produces so much electricity per unit.  There just are not many nuclear plants. And the two failures have been in GenII plants with old designs.  All new builds must be GenIII and higher, with passive redundant safety systems, and all must be able to withstand the worst case disaster, no matter how unlikely.

Two failures in the US nuclear sector? Off the top of my head, I can think of three major nuclear failures that could have put wide swaths of the population at risk, had there been breaches of the sort at Chernobyl and Fukushima: Enrico Fermi in Michigan, 1966; Browns Ferry, Alabama, 1975; and of course, Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979. And I knew there were plenty more, so I did some searching. A list of nuclear accidents at https://pec.putney.net/issue_detail.php?ID=18 lists at least 59 incidents in the US. 59 times that could have led to calamity!

While Gen III designs, with several new layers of redundancy, are clearly superior to the Gen II, they are untried, and some scientists have serious concerns about their safety:

Other engineers, although not outright saying that they are not safer, are more conservative and have some specific concerns. Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has challenged specific cost-saving design choices made for two generation III reactors, both the AP1000 and ESBWR. Lyman, John Ma (a senior structural engineer at the NRC), and Arnold Gundersen (an anti-nuclear consultant) are concerned about what they perceive as weaknesses in the steel containment vessel and the concrete shield building around the AP1000. They say that the AP1000 containment vessel does not have sufficient safety margins in the event of a direct airplane strike.[3][4]

And let’s not forget that the Generation II plants were themselves a reaction to (and supposed improvement over) safety flaws in the old Generation I series.

Also, for all the talk about withstanding the worst-case disaster, let’s not forget that humans have often drastically underestimated the power to create havoc. Nobody thought that a tsunami would breach the seawalls at Fukushima. No one thought New Orleans would be flooded not by Hurricane Katrina flooding the Mississippi, but by the storm’s breech of the levee holding back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain.

Oddly enough, my discussion with Mr. Klute had mostly been on the question of the carbon impact of nuclear, and my contention that all the many steps in the fuel cycle, starting with mining, have a significant carbon footprint. But the Forbes piece didn’t address the issue, and that conversation will have to wait for another day.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Innovation, privacy, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

In all the buzz about Google Glass, some people are raising deep concerns about privacy. Mostly about the privacy the wearer of Google Glass will sacrifice.

But the issues go well beyond that. Mark Hurst’s very thoughtful article, “The Google Glass feature no one is talking about,” for instance, brings up the disturbing spectre of Google creating a world where everyone is watching YOU. In other words, non-users could be deeply impacted, and human behavior may actually shift in response to the Big Brother phenomenon of being under constant surveillance, person-to-person as opposed to camera-to-location.

Yet I think privacy concerns may be far less significant than something I don’t hear anyone discussing AT ALL: the question of whether literally seeing the world through Google Glass’s technology is essentially a radical shift in the human experience: an engineered electromechanical “mutation” that could have results as far-reaching and unforeseen as genetic engineering.

Already, we live in a world where centuries-old patterns of communication have been blown apart by computers, mobile phones, and other disruptive technologies. And for the most part, this is positive–despite idiocies like the pedestrian I saw the other day who couldn’t stop texting long enough to see if it was safe before he crossed the street. But when a device becomes an extension of our bodies to such an extent, I have to wonder: What are the consequences of seeing the world through the Internet and Google Glass, rather than through our own eyes, as we walk down the street? What happens when governments or corporations start filtering and controlling our very sensory input, even when we’re in the “natural” world away from our computers?

I’m not a Luddite. But I do believe in the Precautionary Principle, which states that we should not engage in actions that have potentially harmful consequences if we don’t know what those consequences are. Violating the Precautionary Principle has led to many calamities, from catastrophic climate change to ecosystems being thrown out of balance to the 250,000-year threat of global contamination by nuclear waste leaks. In other words, we should keep our assorted genies in the bottle until we know what we’re about to unleash. And I think Google Glass could be one such genie. Particularly if future iterations in totalitarian states make Google Glass or similar technology less optional, and less easy to remove.

Love to get your comments on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, General Commentary, Other, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

I listened to a call with Debra Poneman, and she shared one of the most astonishing and moving stories I’ve ever heard.

During the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa following the fall of the apartheid government, an elderly South African woman listened to a soldier confess the brutal murder of her husband and son. The jude asked her what she wanted from this man, and she had three requests.

1. To take her to the murder site to gather some ashes and give it a proper burial

2. To “become her family”: to be her surrogate son and absorb some of the love she still had, by visiting her every two weeks

3. To accept her complete forgiveness for him, starting with the powerful hug she wanted to give him right then and there.

If this woman can find the strength of love in her heart to not just forgive her enemy but to make him a part of her family, is there anything the rest of us have experienced that could not be forgiven? I took this to heart—and when Debra led us on a forgiveness exercise after recounting this story, I took on a deep challenge: forgiving the stranger who had grabbed me off the streets of my West Bronx neighborhood and raped me when I was about 11 years old.

This was not easy for me. I don’t know if I fully succeeded. But I definitely got through at least some of my “stuff” about this man, who I never saw before or since. And quite frankly, I felt better afterward. I was reminded that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the person who transgressed; we forgive, and we heal ourselves.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

Hint: it has a lot to do with the government’s unwillingness to jump-start this sector the way it has previously jump-started such (polluting) sectors as automobile (not even talking about the bailouts, but about government-subsidized road construction starting more than 100 years ago) and of course, fossil/nuclear fuels.

Read this article from Green America to learn more about the ways governments in places like Germany and China have made renewable energy a priority. And then think about what would happen if the US created a Marshal Plan-style federal program to buy enough solar that it becomes affordable for all—as I have called for many times (see, for example, https://greenandprofitable.com/an-open-letter-to-nancy-pelosi-and-harry-reid/).

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

What a contrast! Two articulate, well-informed men talking about SUBSTANCE! ISSUES! People speculated ahead that the Biden-Ryan debate might be “too wonky” for average people–but I think ordinary folks are smarter than the pundits give them credit for.

Both men at the top of the ticket–the lying bully with nothing to say, and the sleepwalker–could learn from their running mates.

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By Posted on Posted in language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Dear Mitt Romney:

A few months ago, we heard that you participated in beating up a gay kid when you were a high school student. Watching you at the debate tonight, I can easily believe that you were a high school bully. You’re still a bully!

Do you think you’re going to score points by jumping in repeatedly when it wasn’t your turn, monopolizing the time to make the same three or four tired points over and over again instead of following the rules of the debate? Do you think the rules don’t apply to the 1%? Just because president Obama was too polite and Jim Lehrer too ineffectual to stop you from grabbing far more than your share does not mean it sits well with those of us who were paying attention.

And neither does your latest round of flip-flopping–or should I call it by its more accurate name: hypocrisy? How, all of a sudden, are we supposed to believe that you’re a great friend of the middle class, that you will not cut taxes for the wealthy, and that you’re happy about government regulation? That’s not what you said all the way through the primary debates. It’s not what you said in a campaign stop when you told that poor shnook, “Corporations are people, my friend.” And it’s not what you said when you dismissed 47 percent of the American people, at a private fundraiser when you thought the world wasn’t listening.

And then there are the lies: You know the $716 billion claim is nonsense. And where did you get the absurd statement that half of the green energy companies the government invested in have failed? If I counted right, this ABC news story cites eight separate false statements from Mitt Romney, and they didn’t even pick up on the energy gaffe. In fact, there’s a spate of Twitter activity using the hashtag #MittLies.

Yet again, the question must be asked, which is the real Mitt Romney? And can somebody please give Jim Lehrer the hook before the next debate and put in a moderator who can set limits on this out-of-control man?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

I’ve been saying for years that we have the technology to fix many of the worlds environmental problems; we lack only the will. And new, exciting technologies to go deeper in the quest for solutions are being released all the time.

I just read about a great example: an ultrabsorbent “nanosponge” that drinks up spilled oil, but doesn’t absorb water. It’s even reusable! What a wonderful world!

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