Tag: John Wiley & Sons

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 Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Since John Wiley & Sons is publishing my next book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I was very pleased this morning to discover a press release about its first sustainability/responsibility report.

Wiley’s press release includes ten accomplishments for the fiscal year just ended, addressing everything from responsibly sourced paper and lower paper consumption to carbon control to social outreach in its headquarters town of Hoboken, New Jersey–and eight goals for the current year, focused on broadening its impact beyond its own corporate borders.

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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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