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

Of course,there are a hundred ways to run a great social media campaign–but when I received this e-mail, I thought it was such a good blueprint for running a social media campaign that I’d like to share it with all of you. Yes, I’ve seen others just as good; this one happened to strike my fancy, and when I wrote for permission, it was granted.

Model this in your own campaigns, and your success chances will be high:

Dear Shel,

Thanks again for supporting what is turning out to be an incredible book campaign. Because of you the Ask and You Will Succeed Campaign has turned out to be one of the largest internet campaigns to date. Our goal is to have over 125 affiliates sending 12 million opt in emails on June 16th, along with a Blog strategy, Social Media Plan, Contests, Internet Radio, Internet TV, Press and much more.

Below you will find several suggestions on what to say to your friends, associates and family on Facebook and Twitter. Our Facebook expert Debra Simpson put these posts together to send to your data bases. You may want to model the strategy here for your next product launch.

Please start posting these immediately to your Facebook and Twitter Sites. 

Social Media Verbiage for the Ask and You Will Succeed Campaign

For Facebook:
1.  Here are some Short URLs for your posts

AskSucceed.com                                         https://tr.im/AskSucceed

AskSucceed.com/partners.html https://tr.im/AskPartners

Ask And You Will Succeed Fan Page https://tr.im/FanPage

Facebook Posts:

I’m a Fan of Ask and You Will Succeed. Check it out: https://tr.im/FanPage
2. Send your contacts to the Ask and You Will Succeed book launch page:

Ask Your Way To Success. In this life enhancing guide like no other, Kenneth Foster shows readers how to solve any problem, any time, any place by asking the right questions. Ask and You Will Succeed is based on the commanding questions that govern the creative laws of success, and shatters the myth that success is the result of the advice, hard work, or driving ambition of others. https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Human Excellence expert Kenneth Foster shows readers that asking the right questions can increase happiness, prosperity, and productivity, in work and in life. Most of us spend our lives asking the wrong questions and getting nowhere. Ask and You Will Succeed gives you a new perspective on what you can accomplish when you ask the right questions. When you change the questions you ask, there’s no limit to what you can do. https://tr.im/AskSucceed
3. Send your contacts to the Ask and You Will Succeed affiliate sign up page:

Be part of the largest internet book campaigns in history. Kenneth Foster’s book, Ask And You Will Succeed is being launched June 16th. Kenneth has a lot of benefits to affiliates who want to support his efforts. Check out the bonuses here: https://tr.im/AskPartners

Kenneth Foster, author of Ask And You Will Succeed currently has commitments of over 8 million emails going out to opt in data bases with a goal of 12 million and he’s well on his way to hitting this. Another goal is to Tweet to 2 million people on Twitter and have 2 million posts about the campaign on Facebook. He also has a Blog strategy, YouTube plan and a traditional TV, Radio and Press plan. Be part of it by becoming an affiliate: https://tr.im/AskPartners

For Twitter
4. Please RT (retweet) any tweets you see about Kenneth Foster and my book Ask And You Will Succeed

5. Send your contacts to the Ask and You Will Succeed book launch page:

Learning to ask the right questions will help you achieve unlimited success and personal fulfillment. Check out: https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Solve any problem by learning to ask the right questions at the right times. https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Kenneth Foster shatters the myth that people can’t fully control their own destiny and presents questions that prove it. https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Ask and You Will Succeed gives readers the mental tools and skills they need to succeed. https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Ask and You Will Succeed is based on the commanding questions that govern the creative laws of success, Kenneth Foster https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Human Excellence expert Kenneth Foster shows how asking the right questions increases happiness, and prosperity https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Ask and You Will Succeed is packed with thought-provoking questions related to the creative laws of success https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Kenneth Foster presents life-changing questions that will help you define & attain success in every area life. https://tr.im/AskSucceed

Ask and You Will Succeed a breath of fresh air in a marketplace crowded w/advice on what to believe & how to live https://tr.im/AskSucceed

I’m a Fan of Ask and You Will Succeed. Check it out: https://companies.to/askandyouwillsucceed/
6. Send your contacts to the Ask and You Will Succeed affiliate sign up page:

Help Kenneth Foster market Ask and You Will Succeed and receive cool freebies https://tr.im/AskPartners

Be part of the largest book launch in internet history and get some great gifts https://tr.im/AskPartners

Want some great business and life tools? Become an affiliate of Ask and You Will Succeed https://tr.im/AskPartners

Ask And You Will Succeed is going to be the biggest book launch in history. Be part of it, sign up now! https://tr.im/AskPartners

Will you be one of 2 mill+ tweets helping Kenneth Foster launch Ask and You Will Succeed? Check out affiliate program https://tr.im/AskPartners

With warmth and gratitude,

Kenneth D. Foster
CEO, Shared Vision Network
Founder, Premier Coaching
Author, Ask and You Will Succeed

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

Oh, this is bright! I got an e-mail from a company I’ve never heard of, about VOIP phone service. By coincidence, I’ve been researching some stuff in that space, so when they offered “The Top Ten Reasons Companies are Switching to (company name),” I actually clicked over to see it (something I normally don’t do in response to unsolicited sales messages).

So they spent all that time and energy to get me to click, and what do I get when I reach the site?

The Top Ten Reasons you should switch to (company name).

Please complete the following form in order to view The Top Ten Reasons you should switch to (company name). Thank you.

They want my name, email address, company, phone, company’s approximate number of phones, number of office locations, and state before they will deign to show me their sales pitch?!? Sorry, guys. I DON’T think so! Utterly clueless!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Media Ethics, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy

Very disturbing article on Total Health Breakthroughs about a deliberate campaign by Merck to intimidate, defund ,and otherwise make life miserable for doctors who dared to speak out about the nasty and sometimes-lethal side effects of Vioxx.

I am not in a position to evaluate the claims this article makes, but if there’s any truth to it at all, we’ve got yet another very serious problem in our health care system.

Isn’t it time we put actual healing in front of corporate profits? And isn’t it time that drug companies and others are held responsible for the consequences of their products–and their strategies?

If you’re in the US, tell your representative in Congress to support HR 676, the Medicare for All bill.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , ,

Fascinating article on BNET about how Microsoft’s much-ballyhooed Bing search engine is no Google killer–because, as I’ve been saying for years (including in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First), branding is not about how much money you pour into the marketing, but about the superior service or product or experience you can deliver.

Which is, after all, how Google achieved search dominance in the first place, as anyone who remembers searching with clunky tools of the mid-90s will attest.

The article does have a solution for Microsoft, though: it identifies a core weakness of Google’s and gives Microsoft an exact recipe to exploit this vulnerability.

I won’t spoil the surprise. Go read it.

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

Man, this is ironic!

I just deleted two comments from the same post, and marked them as spam. Here are the texts:

Things You Should Know About Gardening
,Gardens come in different varieties like the plants you find in them. There are several gardening tips that can be used for all type of gardens. A good way to take care of them is to consider that plants might have some feelings too.

And

Today’s cars can typically be expected to pass the 200,000 mile mark with consistent automobile maintenance. With the price of automobiles, you will want to protect that investment by performing regular maintenance. If you can do much of the work yourself, you will save a lot of money in labor. Invest in a good set of tools and choose quality parts when performing your own automobile maintenance.

Both, incidentally, with the same anonymous Yahoo address. Both in “response” to a post called “Black-Hat Sploggers Leave a Bad Taste.”

Just what does this yo-yo (or maybe I should say, this yahoo, in the Gulliver’s Travels sense) hope to accomplish by spamming a post about spamming bloggers? No way are those links ever going to show up on my moderated comment page. All they do is make work for me. Oh yes, and make sure I will never, ever do business with them.

Want a better way? I recommend my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. If you buy it directly from me, it includes a nice little e-book called Web 2.0 Marketing for the 21st Century, which tells you the right ways to do social media marketing. I’ve been building my business with social media all the way back to 1995, and I have to tell you I don’t suffer these clowns easily. Oh well, it gives me a chance to mouth off. 🙂

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

It is so amazing for me to watch a major foreign policy and development speech by a sitting US president and actually agree with more than 80 percent of it–yet that was the case for Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt. Even under Clinton, I was lucky if I agreed with him 25 or 30 percent of the time, and the number was far lower for speeches of the other presidents in my conscious lifetime.

As a progressive, I issue this challenge to other progressives: hold him to the grand rhetoric of peace, international cooperation, multicultural tolerance, and yes, feminism in the Arab world and at home…and to keep him maintaining his acknowledgment of the important roles of Israel and Iran as well as the Arab and Muslim countries.

But what was that he said about being in Iraq until 2012? Waaay too long.!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

Want to make a REAL impact on carbon footprint, as well as put money back in the pockets of those suffering in this troubled economy (or perhaps those who never participated in the economic boom in the first place)?

I got an e-mail describing a wonderful sustainability project in Cambridge, MA–one that would be easy to replicate anywhere: Weatherization Barnraisings.

Steve Morr-Wineman, one of the initiators, wrote that a group of people organized…

a local energy co-op called the Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET). In August we organized our first event – a weatherization barnraising. It was a simple idea: bring people together to weatherize a house by doing things like insulating doors, windows, and pipes, and installing programmable thermostats and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. We publicized the event with a simple flyer, got on some listserves, and then it just took off through word of mouth – and 40 people showed up.

Since then we’ve been doing one weatherization barnraising a month, and people just keep turning out; 30-40 every time. We’ve assembled a pool of skilled team leaders, gotten contractors to come for free to some of the events, and have expanded the range of weatherizing we can do. The multiplier effects are huge, because people are learning skills they can use to weatherize their own homes.

The Boston Globe even ran a story on the community weatherization project, noting that the group is looking at doing public buildings as well, including a school.

If you’d like to start your own weatherization group, Morr-Wneman and his friends have posted a free how-to manual at https://www.audreyschulman.com/HEET/manual3.htm

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

Harvard Business Review just released a fascinating study on Twitter. The only problem is, it’s completely unreflective of my own experience. This is the comment I left:

“Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?”

It is all of the above and much, much more. And it lends itself much more to qualitative than quantitative research–because each individual user’s experience of Twitter is entirely different depending on who they follow, what times of day they log on, and how much time they spend.

Thus, while this aggregate study offers some very interesting data, it’s hard to know what subset of Twitter users the data applies to.

To me, this very idiosyncratic experience is actually part of Twitter’s charm. I’m following over 800 people, and that means I see little snatches of conversations and threads, different each time I log on (typically, a few times a day for just a few minutes each time). While some prolific Tweeters (Guy Kawasaki among them) show up regularly, the randomness of who’s in my window leads me in all sorts of wonderful new directions. I often say I became a writer because I’m interested in practically everything, and in 140 character-bytes (and their associated links), I get to satisfy those interests in little bits and pieces.

In fact, I must have incorporated research from 20 different articles I first found on Twitter into my next book.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary Tagged with , ,

Some of the comments regarding abortion doctor George Tiller, who was brutally murdered in his church yesterday are just disgusting. Bill O’Reilly, who has been attacking Tiller for years, called him a Nazi and a baby-killer, and made this crack:

And if I could get my hands on Tiller — well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes.

Randall Terry of Operation Rescue called him a mass-murderer.

From what I’ve heard about Tiller, he was a sensitive, caring man who believed in a woman’s ethical right to control her own body.

I can respect the truly pro-life, such as Catholic Worker pacifists who oppose both abortion and war. But I have always found it odd that so many of the people who scream loudest that they’re pro-life, at least as far as unborn fetuses are concerned, suddenly lose their righteous stance when it comes to

  • Sending kids off to die in wars
  • The death penalty
  • Vigilante “justice”
  • Sometimes-fatal torture in prison
  • Bombing civilians

    • If you’re really pro-life, then BE pro-life! Even after birth.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

    When are sustainability measures real, and when are they a counterproductive waste of time and money?

    That was one of a several very interesting questions posed by Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans and award-winning author of Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee (Chelsea Green, 2007).

    Dean’s Beans uses only organic fair-trade coffee and cocoa, typically pays farmers well above the fair-trade minimum while still keeping consumer prices very affordable, and reinvests substantial profits into locally governed sustainability/economic development projects in the communities that supply his coffee. He’s also perhaps the business person with the highest integrity that I’ve ever encountered.

    Not surprisingly, his revenues and profits have grown every year, despite the recession.

    In a speech to small business owners in Massachusetts, Cycon described how he had decided not to invest thousands of dollars in a more eco-friendly liner for disposable coffee cups, that in a year would keep about a basketball’s worth of plastic out of the landfill on a year’s volume of 100,000 cups. It didn’t make either economic or environmental sense, he said.

    On the flip side, Cycon was asked to be the organic coffee supplier when Keurig introduced its wildly popular single-serve coffee makers. He looked at the machine, was disturbed by the large amount of plastic that would be consumed, and suggested to the engineers that they redesign it more sustainably, replacing the disposable plastic containers with biodegradable ones made of the same thick paper used to make egg cartons. When the company declined, he refused to supply the coffee, a decision that cost him millions of dollars, but which still feels like the right decision to him. He’s actually looking to develop a competing model that would be more eco-friendly.

    Cycon has also been an agent of change within the coffee industry, challenging companies like Starbucks and Green Mountain to up their percentage of fair-trade sources, and to make much larger donations to village sustainability programs in the coffee lands: $10 million to his $10,000, in one case.
    On the fair trade issue, he points out that if a large coffee roaster sources four percent from fair-trade co-ops, that could mean 96 out of every 100 farmers are not making a living wage.

    His challenge to business in general? Bring CSR and sustainability “deeply into your business” as an integral part of decision-making, and don’t just tack it on at the end. With that attitude, Cycon believes companies can influence their vendors, their customers, and other stakeholders to take many more sustainability steps: from convincing UPS to use biodiesel trucks in the fleet to biodegradable paper from their label supplier.

    Award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and seven other books, Shel Horowitz writes and speaks on driving success through environmental sustainability, business ethics, cooperation (even with competitors), attitude, and extreme service. He is the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

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