By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

I was absolutely shocked to see a reference to a book by the infamous Canter & Siegel in one of the publishing discussion lists I participate in.

This is the response I sent:

Are they still around? I find their behavior utterly loathsome! Maybe 12 years ago when I was very new with Internet marketing, I ordered Canter & Siegel’s book from a book club–and lo and behold it was, “we invented newsgroup spamming, aren’t we great?”

Yup–these two are the ones who gleefully take credit for inventing spam, and thus killing the Internet as a viable one-to-one and one-to-many communication tool. I’m sure there’s a special circle in Hell reserved for them and a few thousand of their followers. If there is any justice, they will spend lifetimes chained to their computers, deleting unwanted mail until their eyes give out and they get a jolt of electricity every time they fall asleep over their keyboards. I wouldn’t give them a penny, I don’t care *what* they’ve done since.

Normally, if I buy a book I’m not crazy about, I figure it’s my tough luck and I give it away. I had a moral problem with this one, and I returned it for full credit–with a note encouraging them to think about dropping it from their catalog.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

Forgive me if I can’t work up too much sympathy for Justice Clarence Thomas. I didn’t find him credible during his confirmation hearings with his “poor, pitiful me” bit, and I don’t find him credible now, as I read about his new book.

And I always found it incredibly distasteful that he had the chutzpah to claim that being asked some questions about allegations of grossly unsuitable behavior–sexual harassment of an employee, in fact–was in the same category as a lynching. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you get lynched if people ask you some tough questions. Questions that you still haven’t really ever answered in a meaningful way.

Thurgood Marshall, a man who truly deserved the term “Honorable” in front of his name, with a distinguished career not only as a jurist but earlier, as a lawyer, must be throwing up. (Marshall, you may not know, was one of the attorneys who argued the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. And Thomas inherited his seat on the Court.)

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post cites a large pile of evidence that Thomas does not have clean hands in the Anita Hill matter–and cites his own words from the book to prove that he’s still just as angry, arrogant, and completely clueless as ever.

This is his own words about actually getting confirmed:

“Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

Sorry, Clarence, but you’re way off base. The Senate had the right and the duty to ask questions, and should have asked a lot harder ones about your views of the Constitution. Maybe if they had, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an extremist like you.

And if today’s Congress was more willing to ask similarly hard questions, we might not be fighting an illegal and unprovoked war in Iraq, we might still have some standing in a world community that increasingly sees the U.S. as a “rogue state,” and we might have found out who actually won the last two Presidential elections, both of which are shrouded in a veil of mystery and deceit.

If Clarence Thomas wants to take his toys and go home, fine. But don’t look to me to agree that he’s been done wrong.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People

As found in John Kremer’s newsletter from earlier this summer.

This is in very close alignment with the principles I discuss at length in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. All of it rings true, and I particularly like the truth and humor in #6 and #10.

Excerpted from Andy Sernovitz’s Word of
Mouth Marketing. As CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association,
Sernovitz excerpted the association’s manifesto. Here it is:

1. Happy customers are your best advertising. Make people happy.

2. Marketing is easy. Earn the respect and recommendation of your
customers. They will do your marketing for you, for free.

3. Ethics and good service come first.

4. You are the user experience (not what your ads say you are).

5. Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.

6. People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.

7. Be interesting, or be invisible.

8. If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.

9. Make the story of your company a good one.

10. It is more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.

11. Use the power of word of mouth to make business treat people better.

12. Honest marketing makes more money.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics: General, People Helping People

Playwright and former Czech President Vaclav Havel has a fabulous op-ed in the New York Times on addressing climate change as a moral and ethical imperative.

He calls for each of us to take personal responsibility, makes the analogy that human damage to the environment is an unpaid loan, and finishes with dire predictions if we don’t move forward on this issue NOW.

As someone who writes regularly on both ethics and the environment, all I can say is read it. And then read it again. And then think about what actions YOU can take.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Columnist Maggie Van Ostrand usually writes humor–good humor. I often send her columns to my humor list.

This week she showed a much more serious side: a penetrating column on political corruption, jumping off from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics annual list of Congress’s 22 biggest crooks (a list which includes Republicans and Democrats–including, to my surprise, John Murtha, D-Penn).

CREW has also formally requested an investigation of (quoting Van Ostrand)…

“Ignite! Learning,” a company founded and headed by Neil Bush, younger brother of the president. Neil Bush, CREW tells us, “has no education background, [and] is best known for his role in the failure of Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers $1.6 billion.”

Quite a bit more about this in Van Ostrand’s article.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics

I may make some enemies among my liberal friends for this one.

This is most of an e-mail I got from the Democratic party yesterday, with the subject, “They’re Already Trying to Steal the White House:

Dear Shel,

If you can’t win, cheat.

Apparently that’s the Republicans’ answer to our work in California. If they have their way, this reliably “blue” state won’t be so blue in 2008.

Faced with a strong Democratic presence, Republicans are campaigning for a new election system instead of their own candidates.

If they get what they’re after, it could cost us the White House.

In California, Republican operatives — including some of the 2004 Swift Boaters — are working on a proposition for the June ballot that would essentially hand over 20 of the state’s electoral votes before the elections even begin next November.

Electoral reform is a good thing — but this proposition doesn’t even come close to an honest effort. It’s designed for just one thing: to make California the only big state in the country to break up its electoral votes, handing the White House back over to the Republicans. We need election reform, but let’s do it for real — and let’s not pick and choose which states we do it in.

We can’t let this proposition get on the ballot. Reject the Republican power grab in California: (link removed)

California, like 47 other states, awards all of its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes. In the last four elections, all of California’s electoral votes have gone to the Democratic nominee.

Republicans want to change the rules to award one electoral vote for each Congressional district a presidential candidate wins. In 2004, that would have given George Bush 19 of John Kerry’s 55 votes.

These so-called “reformers” aren’t proposing to do this in Texas, or Florida, or Ohio, or any other large state that the Republicans won in 2004.

Only California.

This isn’t electoral reform — it’s a blatant power grab. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger is against the proposal, saying:

“I feel like, if you’re all of a sudden in the middle of the game start changing the rules, it’s kind of odd… It almost feels like a loser’s mentality, saying, ‘I cannot win with those rules. So let me change the rules.'”

Don’t let the Republicans cheat to win the election. Make your voice heard now: (link removed)

For Republicans, it’s not Iowa or New Hampshire that matters most in 2008 — it’s California.

Tell them to play by the rules.

Sincerely,

Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.

Waht’s wrong with this picture? Just this: I have been saying for years that the winner-take-all system is blatantly unfair, that it completely disenfranchises up to 49.9% of the electorate in a close vote. Both Nebraska and Maine apportion their electoral votes, and it hasn’t seemed to hurt them. In Europe, the various Parliaments are composed of proportional blocks, with parties gaining strength according to the proportion of the overall vote. The strongest party gets to name the Prime Minister.

So, rather than criticizing California for doing the right thing–I’d like to see that spread to Florida, Texas, Ohio, and a lot of other states (like all of them).

The reality is there’s no such thing as a red state or a blue state. If you look at any state map broken down by party vote, you’ll typically see blue areas around major cities and liberal college communities, and red in the rural areas.

That would be a step toward *true* democracy

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Publishing

One day after Xing’s

And this is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I can post away, knowing that I have a paper trail showing the integrity of my rights ownership.

Bravo! And hmmm, maybe they’ll reword it to cover what they really need without appearing to make a rights grab.

Those links to the two previous posts again:

My original letter (and the overall context)

Xing’s first response

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Master copywriter Gary Bencivenga is always worth reading. I particularly liked his latest, on how to persuade with metaphor. The example of his own lawyer intervening on Gary’s real estate deal with “You want to sell Gary and Pauline a toy store on the day after Christmas. No fair!” is worth the article by itself.

Someone who’s great at combining metaphor, cliche, and a fresh twist is Sam Horn, author of Tongue Fu and other books–and that book title is a perfect example of the magic she works. If I ever need help naming a product, I’ll hire her. Meanwhile, click here if you want her free report on “how to POP! and STAND OUT IN ANY CROWD” (capitals in the original)–the offer is on the left side, a bit hard to see.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Ethics-International, Shel's Personal Life

Wow, they’re fast! Points for customer service, for sure. Less than an hour after I posted my query.

But the response was ambiguous, if polite:

Thanks for your message. We appreciate your thoughtful insight into our Terms
& Conditions and will take your comments into consideration. Apologies if your
reservations prevents you from becoming a member.

What this means is that I may join, but I’m not going to post anything useful on the forums until the TOS is changed.

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

I got an invitation to join a social network called Xing. It’s a business-oriented group based in Germany.

It looked promising, so I started the sign up process. Got all the way down to agreeing to the terms of service. I do give these a quick scan, because sometimes there are unfriendly clauses. This was one of those times.

First, a thank-you to Xing for making the type nice and big and legible. I have no patience with TOS agreements in 8-point type and have bailed on some, or if I was really in a position to need the service, taken the extra step to copy into Word and blow it up big enough to read.

The first thing I saw that made me say “huh” was one of the grounds for termination:

If the User is a member of a religious sect or a denomination that is controversial in Germany.

I’m assuming this is to keep hate groups out, but it’s very strangely worded. What isn’t controversial, after all? But I’m not a member of any terrorist orgs so OK, I’ll let it go.

But then, I found this:

When the User posts his or her contribution to a forum, the User grants XING an unlimited, irrevocable and assignable right of use for the respective contribution, which XING is entitled to utilize for any purpose. In particular, XING is entitled to keep said contribution on the forum, and on its Web sites and the Web sites of its partners, or use it for marketing the forum in any other way.

Consequently, XING has a right of use over all contributions to discussion forums it operates. Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications is prohibited without the express written consent of XING. Copying, downloading, dissemination, distribution and storing of the contents of XING and/or third parties, with the exception of the cache memory when searching for forum pages, is prohibited without its express consent.

Um, excuse me, but no. I make my living as a writer. I want the ability to repurpose my own posts without crawling to Xing for permission. I certainly recognize Xing’s need to display and desire to have the option of parading my stuff around–but not if they don’t let me do the same. So this is what I submitted on the contact form:

Question About Terms of Service

I have a question about Clause 12, and I can’t really complete the signup until this is answered. As currently written, this transfers all rights to you from the poster. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the nonexclusive rights you claim i the second paragraph, and then in the second paragraph after the words, “Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications” INSERT “by anyone other than the original author of the forum post”

As a professional writer, I am quite concerned about my intellectual property rights. If I were to join under the current language, I would not contribute any forum posts (and I’m someone who posts extensively to Internet discussions)–because I wouldn’t want to ask permission to use my own words in a blog post, article, or book at some point.

I’ll let you know their response.

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