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BNET: Why Bing Won't Bother Google–and What Microsoft Should Do Instead

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 7, 2009 Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with bnet, google, microsoft bing, strategic branding

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.

Just How Stupid ARE These Sploggers Anyway?

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 6, 2009 Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with black hat, social media marketing, spamers, sploggers, web 2.0

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. 🙂

Obama's Groundbreaking Middle East Speech

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 4, 2009 Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with afghanistan, bzarack obama, cairo speech, egypt, feminism, iddle east, iran, iraq, islam, israel, muslims

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.!

Weatherization Barnraisings: A Great Sustainability Project

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 3, 2009 Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People Tagged with community, cooperation, environment, green buildings, weatherization

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

Flawed But Interesting Harvard Study on Twitter

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 2, 2009 Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with harvard business review twitter study, user of twitter

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.

Is the Far Right Only Pro-Life Until Birth?

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 1, 2009 Posted in General Commentary Tagged with bill o'reilly, dr. george tiller murder, randall terry

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.

Measuring Sustainability in EVERY Aspect of Business: Dean's Beans

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on May 21, 2009 Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with dean cycon, dean's beans, organic fair-trade coffee, sustainability

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.

And When Did "Pimp" Become a Positive Verb, Anyway?

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on May 19, 2009 Posted in Ethics: General, language Tagged with language, pimp my

Call me old-fashioned, but I reject the transition of “pimp” form a negative noun–a man who rents out the bodies of women he controls (and a verb to describe that action)–to a positive verb, to make something look classy and flashy by adding gizmos and gewgaws and bling.

I don’t like it. Pimping is not a “virtue” I choose to support. I’m a wordsmith for a living–so let me propose some alternatives. We’ve got great nouns like swank or swanky, chic, glitzy, snazzy–can we turn them into verbs?
Swankify? (awkward-sounding). Chicken? (um, no, that’s taken). Snazz (I like that!). Sparkle? (already a verb, sure, why not). Glitter? Glisten? (ditto)

Let’s use our rich, rich language and banish “pimp” as a “good” verb. It’ll take some work. The phrase “pimp my” brings 10,900,000 search results, and I’m guessing almost all of them from the last two years. I’m not a language purist, believe me, but let’s put this one back in the bottle.

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