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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For many years, I’ve been writing about the Abundance Principle: a corollary to the Law of Attraction that I’ve been espousing long before I ever heard of Law of Attraction. Basically it’s the idea that the universe is abundant; there’s enough good stuff for all, despite kinks in distribution. And that if you focus on this abundance, the world shows itself as an abundant place. This is one of the key principles in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

Well, today, I’ve just been swimming in the lovely waters of the Abundance Principle. If any one of these things happened in one day, I’d post a Tweet. With all of them happening on the same day, I’d be monopolizing people’s Twitter streams, which would be rude. So I’ll post here instead.

  • After about two months of silence, my negotiating partner in Africa came back with dates and cities for a three-country speaking tour this summer
  • Today, my co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, gave me the first feedback on the just-completed manuscript of my eighth book (and something like his 70th), Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, which will be out in about a year from Wiley–and he’s delighted with it. Yesterday, I finished the edit, and today, I got through all the permissions letters I had to send.
  • A major new sustainability site hired me for an ongoing paying weekly blog. The pay is low, but after over four years of blogging, I can now call myself a professional blogger. And it’s really good visibility, especially with the new book coming out next year.
  • After a week of rain, we finally got a nice day–and Dina and I managed not only our daily dog-hike but also a short bike ride.
  • When I went to the doctor, he said I don’t have an eye infection after all–just allergies
  • Got offered comp tickets for a local theater production in one of my favorite venues
  • Getting some extra exposure on a speaking gig next week
  • Also got comped (ok, so that was last night) on a hotshot marketing conference where I’m going to get to meet some people who’ve been very important to me
  • Potential intern coming tomorrow who’s actually read most of my books; I will have lots to keep her busy!
  • My daughter, still in Spain, seems completely recovered from her illness

    • I have a feeling I’m leaving some things out, but anyway, it’s been a very good day. It’s great when principles I stand for get to play out so positively in real life.

    I wish you similar abundance in your life!

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

    Yesterday’s edition of Christopher Baauer’s Weekly Ethics Thought newsletter bore a startling statistic:

    43.8% of the surveyed companies said they would not refer uncovered fraud to law enforcement due to fears of bad publicity.

    Wow! So these companies are potentially throwing away millions of dollars because they’re too ashamed of the bad press they’d receive.
    Like Bauer, I say avoid the problem in the first place by having strong ethics programs in place from the get-go.

    Of course, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I make the case that strong ethics can actually be a profit center–but we’ll cut the bean-counters some slack and demonstrate that at least a culture of ethics has significant cost-control advantages.

    His article isn’t on the Web, but here’s a link to Bauer’s site.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Publishing Tagged with , , , , ,

    In 2002, when I was writing my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a lot of the ideas in it were way out in front of the pack. Not a lot of people were talking about corporate environmental sustainability, and pretty much no one was talking about success through business ethics.

    I spent a lot of time this weekend editing the manuscript for my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (which will be published about a year from now by Wiley, and co-authored with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson). And I was struck once again by how much these issues have moved into the general discourse. It’s so easy to find sources now! Everyone’s talking about sustainability, and business ethics has a lot more street cred than it used to.

    Of course, no one ever really knows what takes a radical idea and pushes it to become a trend–but I like to think that my work, and particularly the Business Ethics Pledge campaign I started in 2004, has at least something to do with the shift. The whole idea of that campaign is to move the ideas through a small number of influencers and create a “tipping point” within society. We certainly haven’t reached the tipping point yet, but I think we might be seeing some of the early rumbles.

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    By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

    When a lot of people think of crowd-sourcing–harnessing the network of common wisdom–they probably think first of Wikipedia, which is written by its users. But Wikipedia, and Wikis in general, are only the most visible piece of an amazing phenomenon that dates back to the earliest days of the Net. Maybe eight or ten years ago, I was interviewed in some publication about how to get support and problems-solving for free or very low cost. And I described, among other things, how I got technical support from my then-most-current social media strategy: e-mail discussion groups.

    It’s usually easy to find an informed and intelligent group of people who are delighted to answer your question. Online communities have been solving people’s problems for several decades. The form keeps evolving–from BBSs to -L listservs to yahoogroups, and now, to communities like Twitter, groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. But just as TV did not replace radio and radio did not replace print, this is an additive process; the old ways still work.

    Just today, I ran into a problem with my home phone somehow forwarding to my business line. I didn’t set this up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. So I posted on Twitter, and a few minutes later, I had the answer. But I also have an issue with Amazon.com’s Advantage program, and I won’t look for the answer on Twitter or Facebook. I’m going to be asking on the two yahoogroups publishing discussion lists I follow. I expect I’ll find the answer. Knowing which audience makes sense for which kinds of questions makes a difference. And it also makes a difference if you consistently provide value to others within the community; people will be much more helpful if you’re seen as one of the “good guys.”

    So…with all this free consulting (not to mention free information on the Web, already posted)…why do people still need consultants? Simple: Responses on social networks are typically off-the-cuff, general advice that may or may not be relevant to a specific situation. Even if someone spends 20 or 30 minutes answering a question, that person doesn’t know your specific situation, and won’t be expected to go into depth. In fact, social networks are an excellent way to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about, so that when people do need to go deeper, they turn to you.

    Yes, this really works; I’ve actually built my business on it. And just as an example of the free-to-fee model, I’ve given you the skeleton here. If you want to know the nuts and bolt, I have various infoproducts that can help, including my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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    By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

    I read a very interesting article called “How to Weather a Twitterstorm“–and one of the most interesting parts was the comments, which included a whole lot of people who basically said that Twitter, Facebook and other social media are a marginal part of the overall audience, and kowtowing to them is a mistake.

    I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Twitter, et al. They have influence beyond their numbers, and there’s certainly precedent for stories leaping out of niche social media into the mainstream, with major consequences. Just ask Dan Rather about the fake memo about Bush’s military service that cost several key staffers their jobs and forced Rather into premature retirement. I have been a deep critic of Bush (and a fan of Rather), but when I saw the memo reproduced online, I knew there was no way it could be authentic. It was done on a modern word processor.

    In my view, the article’s author, Abbey Klaassen, is more on target. she offers strategies to evaluate, contain, and appropriately respond to online criticism.

    The point is critical that you want to acknowledge and contain the problem, and do so rapidly. And Twitter can be a great tool for this. Smart companies are finding ways to build their brand on Twitter, and one of the best is to be open to criticism while finding effective ways to defuse it. The Twitter page for Comcastcares is a great example of this. It’s all about customer service for cable TV customers with technical problems.

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    By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Mari Smith is a brilliant young marketer who has absolutely seized the reins of Facebook and Twitter and become a social media rock star. We had a conversation a couple of years ago when I was keynoting a conference she was attending, and she was the one who finally pushed me over the edge to get set up on Facebook. I’d already been on several other social networks without any visible results, but under Mari’s guidance, I found Facebook indeed quite useful.

    Yesterday, Mari put up a great new blog post that I really like, jumping on the news that Oprah has begun Twittering and featured Twitter (and actor Ashton Kutcher, who is the first Twitterer to have a million people following his tweets–and in just a couple of days, has jumped to 1,201,192–that’s another 200,000 people! Most people have fewer than 500 total) on a recent episode.

    Mari issued a call to become a “conscious twitterer.” That’s been my approach all along, and I’m delighted that Mari has given it a name.

    Speaking of conscious social media: this blog is likely to be pretty quiet the next ten days. I’m leaving the country and made a “conscious” decision to leave my laptop behind. I do have one post queued up for later in the week, just to keep the search engines from thinking I’ve abandoned it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Okay, we all know the usual places to put money are performing pretty badly right now. But get this: the Empire State Building is embarking on a massive energy retrofit that will return nearly 28 percent a year! The project will cost $13.2 million, not exactly chump change–but will slash energy consumption by 35 to 40 percent, and save $3.8 million a year (considerably more, if energy costs spike back up again). After the third year, that’s nearly $4 million going directly to the bottom line. If the improvements have even a 20-year lifespan, that $13.2 million investment would return $176 million, and that’s with stable energy prices. The number is much, much higher if you factor in average energy cost increases of 5 percent a year. (I’m not going to do the math here, because I don’t know all the factors we’d need to compute–but it’s sure to be at least $200 million, maybe much more).

    Too bad we can’t put our Roth IRAs into renewable-energy retrofits .

    Meanwhile, we can all learn from the creative thinking at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is doing the heavy lifting on this project–for example, remanufacturing the windows on-site to reduce trucking costs in fuel and money. For years, RMI has been generating this kind of holistic, big-picture energy planning that saves many times the cost, and quickly. I profile RMI founder Amory Lovins in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

    Unbelievably stupid quote from the agrochemical trade group Mid America Croplife Association, whose members include the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and other manufacturers of farm chemicals (oh, and can you spot the two grammar errors in those three sentences?):

    Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

    This quote was in an e-mail to the group’s supporters, enclosing a classic-PR letter to Michelle Obama (or “Mrs. Barack Obama,” as the letter calls her–and for which one blogger took the authors to task), apparently authored by Bonnie McCarvel, Executive Director. You can see both MACA’s letter to Michelle Obama and the cover note here.

    As a long-time believer in organic agriculture/sustainability and as someone who eats out of my family’s organic garden and a local organic CSA farm all summer and fall, I was all set to do a rant on the idiocy of this statement. But before jumping in, I Googled around, and decided to focus on some other lessons; that one’s been done about 24,000 times on the blogosphere already.

    Lesson 1: Never say or write anything that will come back to haunt you. As MACA found out, you can’t assume an internal memo will stay internal. so say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to back up your assertions.

    Lesson 2: Backlash is quick and can be humiliating. Numerous petition campaigns have sprung up supporting Michelle’s desire to grow organic, and the already-shaky credibility of the pesticide industry might take a big hit.

    Lesson 3: Old-school PR is no longer enough in a world where journalists no longer stand as intermediaries and gatekeepers between press releases and the public. From a technical PR standpoint, the letter MACA sent to Michelle Obama is quite good: full of reassuring language, on-the-surface well-reasoned arguments about the importance of agriculture, etc. But in a busy, harried world, it doesn’t get to the point; without the controversy, the recipient might not have even figured out (on the quick 30-second scan) that the letter was advocating chemical agriculture. Which hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from picking apart every nuance.

    Lesson 4: Controversy and stupidity are just as sexy to the blogosphere as to traditional media. For all the carefully worded letter to Michelle Obama, what stands out (and is getting most of the attention) is the dumb quote in the supporter cover letter about organic gardening making them shudder.

    Lesson 5: If the mainstream media wants to stay relevant, it needs to be visible. On three different Google searches on this story, including one for the exact quote from the cover letter, I did not see a single mainstream media result in the top three pages. The closest was a non-journalist’s blog quoted (apparently by a content-scraping robot) on the Wall Street Journal site, which was #28. Blogs and newsletters about gardening, sustainability, and progressive politics were all over this story, but the voice of traditional journalism was not being heard. I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole thing was an urban legend, until I finally tracked down the actual letter, on a local-foods blog. As newspapers are folding every week, as electronic news organizations are laying off staff, people will be asking why we need these trained and theoretically unbiased filters, if they’re AWOL on important stories (or if not AWOL, hidden deep under a rock). This will be a critical question. I’m of the strong opinion that we still need journalists to keep politicians and corporations honest, but journalism’s lack of presence on this and other stories makes that a much tougher argument.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Reviews, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

    A very good basic introduction to the most important social network platforms–and some truly extraordinary content about how and why to use video to achieve massive conversion rates. A nice Q&A section answers several common beginner questions, very sensibly.

    Clearly written, and delightfully formatted for easy on-screen reading.

    Shama also walks her talk. In the six or eight months since I first saw her name, I’m running into her everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, as a teleseminar guest with various other expert marketers…all using the no-cost social media techniques she describes in this e-book.

    I’d recommend this highly for those just starting out in social media, as a way to jump-start your education. And if you’re experienced but haven’t done video marketing yet, or have not found it effective, that short section will be more than worth the price.

    Shel Horowitz, author of Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and six other books

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