By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , , , , ,
  • Can you preserve the soil by switching to no-till farming if it means you can’t use organic methods?
  • Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?
  • If biodegradable (PLA) plastics are made from GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, are they any better than non-biodegradable plastic?
  • Is organic enough of a standard, or do we hold out for the much stricter but much rarer Demeter Biodynamic certification?
  • Are food-industry giants squeezing out small artisan brands, or opening up new opportunities for them?
  • And can we achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger?

These are some of the questions attendees at the Sustainable Foods Summit grappled with on January 18 and 19, 2011 in San Francisco.

Conference presenters included a number of certification agencies and a few consultants (including me on the marketing side) as well as producers and retailers both from major companies like Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, Safeway and White Wave (whose brands include Silk and Horizon) as well as much smaller companies like Theo Chocolate and Washington State’s Stone-Buhr Flour.

Some of the things I hadn’t heard before:

  • It’s well-known that cows are a huge source of methane emissions (a worse climate change problem than CO2)—but I hadn’t known that cow burps cause almost twice the emissions of cow manure, and that cow burping can be greatly reduced through feeding the cows a healthier organic grass-based diet rich in flax, which also raises the Omega-3 level in the milk (a good thing).
  • Cows fed a healthy organic diet live an average of three times as long and have more lactation cycles; this translates directly into increased profitability of the farmer.
  • Organic farming can sequester 7000 pounds per acre of CO2 per year.
  • By converting some acreage to oilseed crops such as sunflowers, farms can supply a goodly percentage of their energy needs, feed cows, and gather the seeds as a cash crop. (These four bullets from Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley dairy cooperative; the percentages on cow emissions were from Bree Johnson of Straus Family Creamery)
  • Makers of biodegradable plastics often source from GMO corn. (Adrianna Michael, Organic and Wellness News)
  • No-till farming vastly reduces soil erosion (which can lower the altitude of a conventional farm by more than a foot in 40 years), but is difficult to do without chemical weed control.
  • Organic, interplanted, and no-till soil hold a lot more water, and look, smell, and even taste healthier than conventional soil.
  • Some private-label supermarket brands, including Safeway’s O Organics, are now being marketed through other retail channels not owned by the original company. (Alex Petrov, Safeway)
  • Even though it’s more expensive to start with, you get 20% more yield from a natural beef patty compared to a conventional one, which makes progress toward evening out the price. (Maisie Greenawalt: Bon Appetit Management Company, an institutional food service provider for colleges, museums, and corporate cafeterias)

(This report will continue tomorrow)

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

I just had a very unpleasant experience buying a ticket on Delta Airlines’ website. And since, in writing and speaking about creating green, ethical, and expectation-surpassing business success, I often address customer service issues, I’m going to transform this crappy experience into a no-charge customer service consultation to Delta. I get a blog post; they get free advice. Deal?

1. Thou shalt prepopulate your required telephone “country code” field with the United States country code, especially if the passenger has a U.S. address. Most Americans have no idea what our country code is, and if they do know, they’ll type a 1. +001? You’ve got to be kidding.

2. When thee kickest back my form for not having the country code properly, thou shalt remember my preference on whether I want travel insurance, and not subsequently kick it back out because YOU unchecked my preference.

3. Thou shalt load pages in a reasonable time. If I can read one to three e-mails every time I wait for my page to update over my broadband connection, you have a service delivery problem. And when the session requires 20 or so pages because of all those ridiculous kickbacks for the country code or the insurance, you have a frustrated customer spending half an hour of forever-gone time and computer eye fatigue in order to complete a transaction that should have taken under ten minutes.

4. Thou shalt not tell me my session has timed out while waiting for YOUR page to load, and then not really mean it, causing confusion. Fortunately, I’ve seen this before and just hit the back button several times until I got to a screen that remembered I was actually still logged in. I’d have been pretty annoyed if I had to log out and relog in.

5. Thou shalt not try to route me from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale via New York. It would be faster to drive! If you have to send me in the wrong direction, how about someplace a whole lot closer?

6. Thou shalt not try to take 40,000 of my hard-earned miles for a measly domestic flight from New England to Florida. That should get me to Europe!

7. Thou dost earn my gratitude for a reasonable fare when I switched to cash, and thou didst receive my business as a result.

8. However, thou shalt NEVER raise the fare between the time I click the Purchase button and the time you process my credit card! That, if you had been a human and not a computer, would be called an illegal bait and switch. That is also a way to get customers really mad at you and badmouth you publicly over blogs and social networks. If it says $230 when I hit Purchase, you should honor that price and not tell me, oh, by the way, we raised the price while you were having trouble with our webform. (Your exact words were “Due to changing availability, the fare you selected is no longer available. Here’s the lowest fare for your flight(s).”) Yeah, it’s only ten bucks, but it’s absolutely inexcusable. It’s one thing to raise the price if I come back a day or even an hour later, but I had initiated the transaction at the offered price and you didn’t honor it. Your computers should simply not be allowed to do that (and airline sites in general should not be allowed to present ticket options that are no longer available).

9. Thou earnest back a few karma points for ease of seat selection. Thank you.

10. But thou losest them again for not telling me whether any of the flights serve meals, and if so, allowing me to state my dietary requirements. It would be easy enough to indicate meals, snacks, or no food, and if meals, to indicate needs.

OK, there you have my personal 10—not commandments but suggestions—that would improve your customers’ attitude toward you, deliver a much more positive experience, and create fans instead of reluctant buyers. If you want more, I recommend my award-winning eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’ll even give you (or anyone else who registers a purchase a the site) $2000 in extra bonuses for buying a $21.95 book. See, creating a good customer experience isn’t that hard.

In addition to his award-winning books, Shel Horowitz also writes the Green And Profitable (for business) and Green And Practical (for consumers) monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

When setting up my time goals as of the first of the year, I also committed to paying attention to whether they were realistic, and how close I was coming. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be exactly on the mark, and that I wasn’t going to beat myself up for failure when the dominant trend was “this is so much better than you did last year.”

And I won’t be tracking on weeks I’m away. This is an at-home schedule.

So far, I’m actually fairly pleased.

My goals were:

  • Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
  • My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
  • Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
  • Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
  • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
  • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
  • Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
  • Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

And my averages for Monday through Friday:

  • Work for paying clients: 77 minutes (13 minutes below goal)
  • My own writing, research, and marketing: 82 minutes) (22 above goal, this is good!)
  • Processing e-mail: 158 minutes (Uh-oh! Still wrestling that demon!). That does not include the significant time I spend answering queries from reporters—which I’m trying to keep below an hour a day, but really depends on who’s looking for what
  • Participating in social media: 25 minutes (right in the target zone, because I could measure and track and not let it over-consume my time)
  • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 45 minutes (and that will be disproportionate this week too, because I’m getting my taxes done Wednesday)
  • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 33 minutes (pretty good, but more was on household than on office)
  • Professional reading: 38 minutes (a bit low, 22 minutes under)
  • Physical exercise: 63 minutes (that’s fine)

So what have I learned so far?

  • There ARE enough hours of the day, although I understandably came up short the day I had three hours out of the house for meetings and errands (and that threw off the average for financial and organizing, both of which took a zero that day)
  • E-mail is a monster. Even going well over my quota, and even exempting the time I spend answering queries from reporters  I ended the week with 300 more messages in my inbox than I’d started, and spent a bunch of untracked time yesterday fighting it back down below 1000. I get an average of 300 messages every weekday. Some of those take three seconds to scan and delete, some require 15 or 20 minutes to answer, and most are somewhere in between. I’ve always felt that 100 inbound messages a day is a reasonable number to deal with, and I’m now taking active steps to reach that goal. I’ve unsubbed from dozens of newsletters and LinkedIn groups, and will continue to reduce the flow. If I don’t get direct and significant value from nearly every issue, out it goes. I’m also thinking seriously about ways to outsource more of my mail.
  • Finding the time to focus doesn’t necessarily mean productivity. Some of my writing shifts were terrific, with words just pouring into my keyboard. Other days were frustrating, spending 20 minutes in one case to track down just three contacts.
  • Overall, this regime is a very good thing. It is forcing me to stay much more closely on track, I’m feeling very productive, and I’m getting more of my goals accomplished. And I’m working on ways to get more value out of the time I spend, so that’s a secondary goal for me.

I’ll report back next maybe at the end of February, where I’ll have had some time to really work with this and fine-tune it.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with

I received a notice today about a photo exhibit of Albanian Muslim rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust—taken by a Jewish photographer, Norman H. Gershman. This rescue took place while the country was under Nazi occupation:

When Hitler’s troops began invading the Balkan States in the early 1940s, Muslims across Albania took an estimated 2,000 Jewish refugees into their homes en masse and welcomed them not as refugees, but as guests.  They disguised these Jews as Muslims, took them to mosque, called them Muslim names, gave them Muslim passports, hid them when they needed to, and then ferried them to inaccessible mountain hamlets.  “In fact, Albania is the only Nazi-occupied country that sheltered Jews,” says Gershman.  The Jewish population in Albania grew by ten-fold during World War II, and it became the only country in occupied Europe to have more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning.  Records from the International School for Holocaust Studies show that not one Albanian Jew or any of the other thousands of refugees were given up to the Nazis by Albanian Muslims.  “They did this in the name of their religion,” Gershman said.  “They absolutely had no prejudice what so ever.”

If I can manage to get to NYC before January 29, I am so there! I see two key takeaways in this story:

1. Even in the face of unspeakable evil, there will be people who do the right thing, even at great personal risk.

2. This is one of many pieces of historical evidence that Jews and Muslims can coexist, yet another reason to disbelieve the racists on both sides who say such a thing is impossible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Over the weekend, rather than a new year’s resolution, I came up with a formula to break my day into pieces, by task, and hopefully boost my efficiency. My goals for this year are to spend my weekday workdays (starting at 7 a.m. and continuing through 10 pm, with lots of breaks for meetings, eating, outdoor time, cooking, relaxing, spending time with family members, etc.) approximately like this:

  • Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
  • My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
  • Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
  • Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
  • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
  • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
  • Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
  • Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

Well, this is pretty cool for day #1: my actual breakdown, with an hour and a half left to go looks like this:

  • Work for paying clients: 63 minutes (need to improve tomorrow)
  • My own writing, research, and marketing: 62 minutes including writing this post
  • Processing e-mail: 124 minutes
  • Participating in social media: 42 minutes (need to cut back a bit until the other work is done)
  • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 65 minutes, partly because I have a very early tax appointment this year, so for the next couple of weeks this is going to get more attention, and partly because it took me 20 minutes to track down an error in the spreadsheet I was working on
  • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 75 minutes, mostly organizing three weeks of trash for a dump run—tomorrow I hope to spend the quota on my office
  • Professional reading: 31 minutes
  • Physical exercise: 45 minutes with the dog walk, and 20 minutes on my exercycle coming later

I am realistic. I know that life happens, and I won’t be exact. But I’m pretty pleased—and I know that I’m going to spend the next half hour on professional reading, and come in very close on everything except client work. I don’t generally do client work at night, because my clients should get my best thinking, and that’s in daylight.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Green Business, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

1. To move forward on my goal of reaching critical mass for the two self-syndicated columns I’m launching, Green And Profitable, for business, and Green And Practical, for consumers. Both emphasize easy, low-cost, high-return approaches. Click here to see samples of the business column. (I’ve written text and sample columns for Green And Practical, and bought the domain, but this is so new that the site isn’t live yet.) My goal is to have 1000 paid subscribers and/or generate $10K/month from this by the end of 2012. It’s going to be really cheap for media, $10 per insertion—and I’m also offering private-label (PLR) e-mail/print rights to corporations and associations at 25 cents per name per year, which is where I suspect the money will mostly come from. If I’m successful, I will actually, for the first time, make my living as a writer of consumable content, rather than of marketing materials—this after publishing eight books and more than 1000 articles.

–>And by the way, I’d be very grateful for connections to people who might want to license PLR rights to one or both of the columns (people with a green product or service, for instance). I am willing to pay $200 commission for any column client who commits to $1200 per year or more. shel (at) principledprofit.com or twitter to ShelHorowitz.

2. To structure my work days to include two hours of billable/client work, 1 hour on my own writing or marketing (blog, columns, speeches, services), 2 hours maximum on e-mail, 15 to 30 minutes on social media, 1 hour of professional reading, half an hour each on office organization and bills/postal mail, and an hour of exercise. I have timekeeping software, and I’m going to use it.

PS–instead of an annual letter, we did a humorous quiz. If you want to learn more about my family and get a smile in the process, click over and have a look.

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

Got a sales call this afternoon that was soooo pathetic, so 1980. The poor schlep wanted me to schedule an appointment with his field sales guy. Pretty much the first thing he said after telling me his name and his company (both unfamiliar to me) was that the rep would be in my area Thursday.

I politely replied that my time was very precious, and before I scheduled in in-person sales call, I wanted to find out “if it was a good fit for me.” And the first thing I wanted to know was what he was selling.

Turned out to be a credit card processing service. He offered me a free terminal if I would schedule the appointment to tell me about his “favorable” merchant processing rates, depending on the volume.

Well, first of all, I already own my own credit card processing terminal. Second, I’m a pretty low-volume shop, processing a few tickets a month for consulting and a few more for book orders that come to me directly (most are going through traditional book sales channels these days)—so I’m not likely to benefit much from his volume-based rates. And third, when he asked me yet again to set the appointment, I asked for information in writing so I could evaluate the rates. It would have been as simple as giving me a URL to type, but that thought did not occur to him, and probably not to his boss either. In fact, it didn’t even occur to this guy that he could mail or fax the information and then follow up later. (I actually switched to my current merchant processing company because that rep did exactly that, and his rates were in fact substantially better than what I’d been paying.)

Instead, he ended the call.

Well, I’ve got three pieces of advice for people using this selling model:

1. The customer or prospect is in charge these days. I don’t have to bow down to you and be sold to the way you happen to prefer to sell me. You have to offer me the chance to buy the way I want. If you want an in-person appointment and you haven’t shown me the value in it, I won’t meet you. If you want me to sign up over the phone and I want to see the terms in writing, you’ll provide the terms or go away empty.

2. We live in an empowered era. Your competitor is as close as a mouse click. If you won’t people research you, they’ll research, and do business with, somebody else.

3. It’s far more effective to build long-term customer relationships than to go for a quick one-time sale—and these tactics don’t build that relationship.

Of course, I could give them a lot more advice—in the pages of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Events, Green Business, Green Marketing, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I have only half an hour left of being 53. It seems a good time to reflect on the whirlwind year I’ve had. Professionally, a lot has gone right for me this year.

First, of course, this has been my initial year as a Guerrilla Marketing author, and the publishing world is definitely nicer to authors who have hitched their wagon to a star. The folks at Wiley have been far more collaborative and helpful than many authors experience with their big NYC publishers, and certainly more so than Simon & Schuster was with me all those years ago. I’ve been promoting the book constantly all year long, and the publisher and even Amazon have also worked on that goal. And as a result of all that effort, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green has been on the Environmental category bestseller list for at least 11 of the last 12 months—we’re not sure about March—and was #1 in the category for part of April and May. Even cooler—within three weeks of publication, a Google search for the exact phrase “Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green” brought up 1,070,000 hits—far more than I’ve ever seen for anything else I’ve been involved with. Some of those pages have come down since, but as of today, it’s still quite respectable at 551,000. And a search for my name peaked last month at 119,000, nearly double the previous high point of 62 or 64,000.

Because of the new book, I’ve also done quite a bit of speaking this year, including my first international appearance (at an international PR conference in Davos, Switzerland, home of the World Social Forum and World Economic Forum. This was a different event, but in the same venue, and it felt pretty trippy to be speaking from the same building that the likes of Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett speak from. And when you write a book called Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, you have automatic “chops” in both the green community and the marketing world—which is great, since the book really looks at the intersection of profitability and sustainability. I’ve spoken and exhibited at quite a few green events this year (ranging from the mellow, outdoor SolarFest in Vermont to the huge Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in the Washington, DC Convention Center) and made numerous great contacts.

And I discovered, particularly when doing media interviews, that I really do know quite a bit about going green, on a much deeper level than just “made from recycled materials” stuff. I was very pleased with the quality of some of the more than 100 interviews I did this year, finding that a number of the journalists went a lot deeper than others I’ve experienced in the past—and I was able to take them deeper still. I’m not saying this to brag, but because I didn’t actually realize how much I do know about many substantive issues around sustainability until I started answering so many great questions about it.

Part 2 will discuss the most exciting part of my year: a way to get the message in front of a much wider audience. Stay tuned.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

flashmob:“a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.” (Wikipedia)

For the year or so that I’ve been watching the occasional video of flashmobs gathering in public places to perform, I’ve wished I could be part of one. But I didn’t wish strongly enough to organize one.

All the videos I’ve been sent took places in major cities like Amsterdam and Philadelphia. I live in a very rural area whose biggest city (Springfield, MA) has a population of only 155,629. And yet, to make a flashmob, you only need a dozen or so people.

I think a lot of the allure of flashmobs is that for the most part, we live in a society where entertainment is provided, prepackaged. Until 1877 when Edison invented the phonograph, if you wanted to hear music, you gathered some friends with instruments and songbooks and made some. If you wanted a theater experience, you played charades. Public concerts outside of major cities were few and far between. Now, every tiny town has live music 20 or 30 nights a year, and many have music every weekend night all year long. We are, for the most part, deprived of the opportunity to not only make our own entertainment but perform it for others. The flashmob at the Holyoke Mall had one day’s notice, no rehearsal. Singers were to wear a solid color indicating their part (my alto wife wore green, other parts wore red or white)—and of course, many people who just happened to be there joined in the singing.

Thursday, I received an e-mail from the organizer of a local folk music sing-along: a flashmob would gather the following day to sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at the food court of the largest shopping mall near us, the Holyoke Mall (halfway between our house and Springfield, in a town of 40,005). On a Friday night just before Christmas, it would certainly have an audience. Better still, it was organized by the local opera company; the singing would be worth hearing.

The next morning, my wife, D. Dina Friedman, who sings in a community chorus, got an e-mail about the event that went out to all the chorus members. This was looking better and better. And the timing was perfect; we could drop our son off for the final rehearsal of his school’s winter show, go sing, and be back at school in plenty of time to watch him perform.

The singing was magical. Sound coming from every corner of the large and crowded food court, and a few stunningly stellar voices rising above the crowd. It reminded me of the time more than 30 years ago that I happened to be out on a lawn at my college while the chorus was rehearsing for their upcoming tour, and they invited me to stand within their circle and be surrounded by beautiful sound.

What amazed me the most, though, was not the event, but the aftermath. By the time we returned home after Rafael’s show, when I went to post something on Twitter, I found links to at least two different videos, including this very high quality one posted on the Springfield newspaper’s site.

I sent the link around, and got a couple of “wish I was there” or “how did you find out?” responses. And then last night, I went to a different performance, more than 40 miles away from the shopping mall at a retreat center in a really remote area (it happens to be the most beautiful house I know, one I love to visit for this annual storytelling concert)—and at intermission, I heard people talking about the flashmob and wishing they had known ahead.

In other words, even without a big-city backdrop, this flashmob had an impact well beyond the borders of the food court. E-mail made the event possible; social media gave it permanent life. “And I say to myself/What a wonderful world.”

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