For years, I’ve been a proponent of viral marketing; as one among may examples, it’s the main tool I’ve used to gain support for the Business Ethics Pledge.

One of the best viral marketers I know is Ken McArthur, known for his joint-venture Internet marketing conferences. I met Ken several years ago at one of Fred Gleeck’s book marketing conferences, and then again a few years later at Mark Victor Hansen’s book marketing conference. We’ve stayed in touch. And since meeting him, Ive noticed that he crops up absolutely everywhere.

Yet even though he’s obviously been gong to book marketing conferences for years, he didn’t have a book. Now, he’s finally about to release IMPACT: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World (yes, its an affiliate link). I’ve been one of his many informal advisors, and even commented to him a few months ago that I also have a book title that ends with “in a Noisy World” (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, published in 2000 by Chelsea Green

Frugal marketing genius that he is, Ken wouldn’t be content with an ordinary book launch–so he created one of the most powerful viral marketing ideas I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d thought of it.

You know the concept of internships: students donate labor in exchange for training. Ken has taken this to an extreme: he recruited over 100 people to be his unpaid Internet marketing corps, in exchange for learning all his tricks via a series of conference calls. What a perfect example of the Abundance Principle at work! The six-week program started tonight.

I decided that one of my contributions to the effort would be to chronicle it here. So thus, my key takeaways from call #1:

This is an easy one for me, as I know a lot of people in the independent publishing sector. Except that I can’t really separate influencers from JV partners. But because what he’s doing is newsworthy in the publishing world and in the Internet marketing world, I have a number of people I could approach to let them know about what’s going on, including John Kremer, Dan Poynter, Fern Reiss, Patricia Frey, and Joan Stewart–all very big names in the world he’s trying to reach.

Ken being Ken, he makes it quite worthwhile to visit his site, offering a truckload of quality resources just for dropping by.

Is this your chance to learn from a master launcher, without paying thousands of dollars for a product? I think it might just be.

I love discovering fresh, articulate voices who discuss important things. And today I discovered Mike Wagner, of OwnYourOwnBrand.com. He writes elegantly on the brand as based in the customer’s own experience. I particularly enjoyed his story of the broken minor promise that cost a hotel $30,000 in lost future revenue, and also of the receptionist who made him feel special.

What especially interests me is the way I found him. I participate fairly passively on several Web 2.0 social networking sites. This morning, I logged onto Plaxo and found that someone in one of my groups had posted a link to the Thinking Blogger Awards. And Mike was one of the five honored Thinking Bloggers. Is that cool, or what?

If you’re not starting to harness Web 2.0 in your own business, maybe it’s time to start.

Bunch of interesting stuff in the latest issue of the British publication Ethical Corporation, all available online.

Among the goodies:

A rather jaundiced view of Apple’s treatment of its customers and the Steve Jobs mystique–also referred to as the “reality distortion field”

A look at diamond mining giant DeBeers and its partnership with Botswana. This is a company much-criticized by activists over the years. Who knew they even had a corporate citizenship department or a board member from the Botswanan government? I’m not ready to award them a Positive Power Spotlight any time soon but I’m glad to see they’re not completely evil.

An examination of Starbucks’ relationships with its workers amid charges that the company that prides itself publicly on social responsibility is in some ways a less union-friendly climate. On one statistic–percentage o employees covered by the corporate health plan–it compares unfavorably with the notorious union buster Wal-Mart.

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.

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.

It’s not an honor to “win” this award.

In my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I discuss the idea that a company brand is not the slogan, the logo, the corporate colors…but the customer’s experience and perceptions. While the above details may help shape those perceptions, they pale in comparison to the real world experience he customer has in the store, on the website, over the phone.

Here’s my experience of Best Buy. It started off on a very good foot. I found a hard drive on the company website after playing around with Froogle and some other tools. When i went to the store, I had only a few minutes and went directly to a staffer–who, amazingly enough, showed me a better, more modern, higher capacity drive with an extra interface for compatibility with newer machines–at the same price. The buying process was smooth, and after less than five minutes at the store, I was on my way home. This was Tuesday.

But then it all fell apart. This morning (two days later), I tried to set up the drive. The disk mounted, but it was locked. I couldn’t write new information, create a folder, or copy anything onto it.

Usually, a locked disk is something easy to reset in software, but I couldn’t figure out how–and the manual loaded on the disk required some unfamiliar program to read it.

So, after poking around a while, I called the store. Where I was told I had to call the Geek Squad, toll-free. Presumably this team of expert computer sharpshooters would have the answer.

After several minutes on hold, I got a techie on the phone. She didn’t know anything and offered me three options: bring the disk back to the store for “repair” or have me pay $99–what I’d paid for the drive!–to either get support over the phone or have a tech come to my office.

Excuse me, but when I buy a product, I expect it to work–and if it doesn’t, I hardly think it’s fair to double the purchase price in order to get it working. I was flabbergasted. I explained to her that a locked drive was generally dealt with through a simple software command, and suggested to her that she could locate that command and send me on my way very easily.

So I asked to speak with her supervisor. “There’s no supervisor available right now.” This, I think, is a first. I don’t believe I’ve ever called customer service at a large company before and been told no supervisor could take my call.

Then I left my phone number, impressed upon the tech that this was something I really needed to have dealt with this morning, and requested that the supervisor call me within an hour. That was 10 a.m. I’m still waiting for that call, over 12 hours later.

When the call didn’t come, I went to the Seagate (manufacturer) website and fairly quickly determined that to make it work with a Mac, I’d need to reformat the drive using a disk utility. I had the utility on my computer, but it was four years and several operating systems old, and I wanted to make sure it would work. so I called Seagate. Still had to wait a while on hold, but once I got a tech, he talked me through the set up in under five minutes. Utterly painless, the disk is working perfectly, and I didn’t need the $99 “help” from Best Buy.

But Best Buy has lost a customer. This whole experience left me very sour.

While I’ve been blogging since 2005, at http://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ , I’ve been publishing the first two of my monthly e-newsletters all the way back to 1997 (I added another one in 2003, and had planned to launch a fourth son).

At the time I started my zines, I had one website, spam was almost a non-issue, and you could be pretty sure that when you sent an e-mail it would be not only delivered but likely read. At that time, I only had one website: http://www.frugalfun.com , which went live in the spring of 1996.

But I’ve been thinking for quite some time that e-newsletters have lost much of their effectiveness I know that e-mail deliverability is by no means certain anymore, and you can’t rely on getting a bounce notice if it doesn’t get in.

Also, I know that lots of mail that does make it through gets deleted unread. This is certainly true in my own ebox, where I simply can’t compete with the volume of incoming mail. A few weeks ago I started a big purge and got my inbox down from 2400 to 800–it’s already back up to 1190, after five days on a business trip. And that doesn’t count the approximately 100-2009 per day that I throw out in my spamfilter–or the dozen or so that I try to rescue from the spamfilter but never arrive (9ne of my biggest peeves).

This month I asked the 8000 subscribers of my two largest zines if the format was working for them–and got very definite feedback that while the content is valued, the long-form single-email text only format doesn’t work.

But I *know* HTML email doesn’t work. I’ve seen the hideous results when they are corrupted in transmission, and I also know a lot of spam filters automatically catch anything with HTML.

After thinking it over, I decided to convert to a blog. Yesterday, I sent the first one in the new format–a brief email with a sentence or two about each story and a link to the TOC on my blog (which in turn has live links to all the articles).

I’m sure it will evolve (and hopefully take less time to set up, now that I can refer back to certain repeating articles, such as the one about my books).

We’ll see what happens..

My good friend and colleague Bob Burg, author of Winning Without Intimidation, recommended Robert ringer’s newsletter. I was surprised, since Ringer is best known as the author of Winning Through Intimidation.

But on Bob’s recommendation, I went in with an open mind. And so far, I’m impressed.

Visit his most recent newsletter and scroll down to “Letting Go of Your Pacifier.” He tells people to get a grip, not to be seen as overwrought, and remember that first of all, things that seem like life-and-death matters often turn out not to be so, and second, that often, we grow and learn from the crises and not just the opportunities. Oh yes, and if you’re the kind of person who gets so caught up in, say, a major sports event that you start throwing things at your TV, he tells you to get a life. (He’d probably say the same about my addiction to politics.)

You’ve got to wonder about marketers who send those horrible emails where everything is in 8-point type all jammed on the left side of the page and completely unreadable. I own a one-trick-pony software app called SmartWrap that is designed to strip out all the > characters and bad line breaks in multi-quoted e-mail–but it’s also very useful for converting those scrunchy e-mails into something my 49-year-old eyes can handle. If only it supported the page-down key, I’d be all set.

As for my own newsletter prep: I do three monthly newsletters, all in plain text, none of them with pix. I could probably increase deliverability by posting the whole thing on a web page (we do archive them later, but only the main articles) and sending an email with a URL pointer–but I think the higher deliverability would be countered by the lower readership, especially as two of my newsletters target the frugality market and therefore can be expected to have higher-than-usual percentages on dialup.

When I was on dialup, pretty much the only outfit that got me to click to the web was MarketingSherpa.com; now that I’m on broadband, I’m considerably more willing.

However…as a recipient, I loathe HTML, find that in 98% of newsletters with graphics, the graphics are unnecessary–I keep them turned off, so for the most part, I don’t even see the “pretty” pictures–and 3/4 of the time I do turn them on for a particular newsletter, I wonder why they bothered.

As for PDF as an attachment versus a webpage, I’d let it be the reader’s choice. But I do remember that PDF downloads on the web were very annoying when I was on dialup–attachments were better, but only if they weren’t too huge. If a lot of readers are on dialup, it’s probably better to format a page in HTML and send a link. Or just post on a blog!

* * * *
Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

My progressive friends may be shocked. But even though I’m a staunch supporter of gay and lesbian rights, I actually side with the owner of a video duplication service who is being sued for anti-gay discrimination because he refused to duplicate a film on the early gay rights movement.

The service owner, Tim Bono, found the content of the film offensive. I don’t happen to share his taste–but I totally agree that he should not be forced to do work that violates his moral code, even if it’s quite opposite from my moral code.

When I get an inquiry from a new prospect, I respond with an e-mail that says, among other things,

Please note that I reserve the right to reject a project if I feel I’m not the right person for it. This would include projects that in my opinion promote racism, homophobia, bigotry or violence–or that promote the tobacco, nuclear power, or weapons industries–or if I do not feel the product is of high enough quality that I can get enthusiastic about it.

And yes, I have turned down a few jobs because they promoted ideas I feel are reprehensible–including at least one job I turned down because of homophobia.

I grant Mr. Bono the same right to follow his conscience that I claim for myself, even though we choose to exercise it for opposite philosophies. I would presume that if Lilli Vincenz came to him with a different project that was within his value system, he wouldn’t reuse to serve her because she’s a lesbian. To refuse her on the basis of who she is would in fact be discrimination, and she’d have every right to bring the Human rights Commission or the courts into the fight. But a principled rejection of her content is a different matter than discriminating against her because of who she is.

No one should be forced to do work that goes against their own conscience.