eROI Days Email Agency

Last Tuesday, an articulate, inspiring man was voted into office and people all over the world celebrated. In my own neighborhood, fireworks went off and a group of 25 college and high school students were banging pots and pans and stopping traffic on Hawthorne Street to jubilant honks in passing cars.  My family of four walked thru the misty evening and soaked in the positive energy that had our girls jumping up and down gleefully shouting “Obama.” After my wife and I put our girls down to bed, I headed over to a sports bar, OnDeck, for drinks with some close friends - the place was packed and rowdy with 50+ huge TV screens monitoring all of the events of the evening.  The bar became immediately silent when President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago.  We hung on every word.

Since then, it’s been an adjustment. The party only lasted one night and reality set in the next day with the stock market down and life moving at warp speed. Every newspaper and magazine has blitzed us with this momentous, historic event and Obama has lived up to the expectation, for now.  Expectations are so high, that at some point, there will be cracks in his armour. But, hopefully, as a human race that values inspiration, innovation, and progress over fear, we will support him when he stumbles.  As an exercise of documenting a few of the videos and articles that mattered most to me, I am showing them below:

Transcript of Obama’s speech >>

Video of celebrations around the world >>

Thomas Friedman’s Op Ed article from the NY Times >>

Here is an email that I’ve been sending to my entrepreneur friends in Portland today:

Tom Szaky is one of the hottest, most dynamic, young green / sustainable entrepreneurs in the country.  I’m writing you because I know you’d love meeting this amazing entrepreneur who is coming to Portland b/c of its green, sustainable presence (and because I asked him after getting to know him at the past two Inc. 500 conferences).

Tom Szaky is an absolutely amazing speaker (up there w/ President Clinton as another keynote at the Inc. 500 conference last year).  I invited him to fly out here from Trenton, New Jersey to speak to 45-60 entrepreneurs at eROI and he’s able to be here on Sat, Nov 15 at noon (free lunch). This is a Starve Ups event - thanks to John Friess and the Starve Ups member companies for making this happen.

He really is an amazing guy (27 years old and running a $15 million green / sustainable company called TerraCycle where everything about its product and packaging comes from waste) – please consider coming to this.

Here is my past blog post and a Danny Deutsch video:
http://eroidays.com/2007/09/10/amazing-inc-500-conference/

Please let me know if you are interested.  Thx.

Fortunately, in Oregon, we all mail in our votes, and I did so the first day I got the ballot, so I’m off the hook. For those who haven’t voted or don’t intend to vote, you are missing your opportunity to have a very real impact in a critical time in our nation’s history.

PAUL BENNET, IDEO (600 people)

Panasonic & fly a plane on AA batteries
One woman’s comment: Even of if I was the biggest Panasonic competitor, I’d want that plane to fly

Doing good begets doing Good.

Patient Experience – fully get into shoes of customer

1) Happy People unabashedly doing Happy Things
Teamuriggly-putting smiles on people’s faces, no consequences

2) Zappos core values, twitter, zappos.com (After two weeks, offer $2,000 to quit)

Best Buy- like TiVo for your work. Employees are being given permission to be people

1) You need to create a culture of contribution

2) Forget symphonies. Enable jazz= improvise + create your own melody

3) There is no B2B or B2C. Become P2P (person to person); small allows you to behave like human beings.

Going off script and doing something HUMAN
– Start obsessing about ROC (Return on Customers)
– Welcome to the Zappos Experience
– Change one part of your language. Track it “re-schedule appointments” to “broken promises” – 10% down to 3%

Community, Family, Team, Collaboration (NOT Staff, Policy, Training)

Bhutan created the Gross National Happiness Index - super important

Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, is a 27 year-old, game-changer, in the world of green products and the world of beautiful waste. Here are my notes from his Inc. 5000 Breakout Session:

Traditional Green perspective - The more eco-friendly, the more expensive
The larger stores like Walmart & Target are leading the way for more than Whole Foods, etc.

Bottles (Plastic)
Revsed Virgin 30% Recycled Compostable
$0.02 $0.05 $0.07 $0.15

Our products must be: Better, Cheaper, Greener

Pre-Consumer/Post-Consumer (overprint CDs/DVDs), 75% of gift cards never leave warehouse

70lbs waste was produced to make 1lb of waste

99% of what you buy is waste in 6 months

Waste is America’s biggest export

Key is to separate waste

CapriSun- 4.5 billion drink pouches per year

Terra Cycle gets paid to collect the waste (profitable) becauses it is branded

Sort, Sanitize, Waste in Trenton, NJ – then gets flown to Mexico & gets sewn there

Revenue: 3M -> 8M -> 15M

What are the solutions for retailers for greent?
Working with big brands to create creative solutions

You have to evaluate on first two- Better, Cheaper (prove ROI) BTW-it’s Green

Do NOT sell on the virtue of being green. Green is the assumed baseline now. It’s the gravy on top.

Recycle Bank- give credits/$ coupons for recycling more. They’ve increased recycling rate from 20% to 90% in some small cities.

If I can collect enough of 1 thing, it creates value. Lock up I own these waste streams.

BILL McDONOUGH- Cradle to Cradle (Upcycling vs. Downcycling)

Natural Foods Tradeshow, Expo West, Expo East
• Tiny consumer products & companies inspire to be in Whole Foods
• People who are authentically green who don’t work with big brands/retailers

Question: In Germany, charge a lot for garbage to consumers and retailers

Clorox – Green Works – owned the market by being same low price and green

All purpose cleaner- same exact stuff as all the other stuff

9 days ago (1 week before Paul Newman’s death), his business partner, A.E. Hotchner brought over a thousand CEOs to their feet w/ tears in their eyes at the Inc. 500 conference. Here are my notes from his talk:

“Paul Newman’s Own” Companies:
Great product testimonials of Neman’s Own Salad Dressing, Spaghetti Sauce, and hilarious story of a 70-year-old man with erectile dysfunction for 20 years. In the past, this man had tried Viagra many times, natural supplements, everything, yet nothing worked. Until one day, he ate Newman’s Own spicy mango salsa, and it shocked his system into a frenzy - he and his girlfriend are very satisfied with the product and he keeps a pouch of spicy mango salsa on him wherever he goes.

Over the years, Newman’s Own has given almost $300 million to charitable causes.
– Over 25 years of camps for Kids with cancer. At the time only 30% kids survived the year after.
– Now, 119,000 Kids have attended these camps, 70% survived now, investing in cure for cancer.

– Don’t just give to charity, start your own charity.

– Story of 10-year-old girl who held his hand and thanked him – she lived all year just for 8 days of camp.

STANDING OVATION – SNIFFLES AND INTERNALIZING FOR NEXT 20 MINUTES

I know my employees aren’t going to like this level of transparency, but I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with myself for NOT heavily promoting this non-profit workshop that we created from scratch for the benefit of The Boys and Girls Club of Portland. We had a lower than expected turnout at both workshops the past 2 weeks, but on the bright side, we learned some critical take-aways that could make this program a big success this summer or fall when we try it one more time.

Here’s the concept behind the Communication Breakdown Workshop:
The acceleration of technology innovation like Web 2.0 and other online tools is having an adverse effect on family dynamics. Kids and their parents have always struggled to communicate, but these days, they don’t even speak the same language - (IM’ing, hanging out on social networking sites for kids 8-13 years old like Microsoft LiveSpaces, Yahoo! Kids, Disney, and Millsberry). Parents want a way to communicate, connect, and bond with their kids, but still protect them from the predators that they fear in “online communities.” The workshop is a lot like an online scavenger hunt with cool discoveries of safe music-making sites and blog posts on LiveSpaces.

What we learned:
1. Promote it heavily in email, web, search, in-kind media partners, and on-site at The Boys and Girls Club.
2. Don’t schedule the workshop during Spring Break - bad idea.
3. Instead of having a wide age range like 8-13 years old, keep it to 11-13 year olds and their parents or 14-16 year olds. A four year age difference is like light years for kids at that age.
4. FREE pizza will always be the best on-site marketing ever.
5. Try a test run for this workshop at an organization like Friends of the Children where mentors are a huge part of the equation.

No matter what the controversy is that surrounds Lance Armstrong, you have to give the guy credit for extreme mental toughness in the name of a powerful cause to fight cancer. So many celebrities talk a big game, it’s nice to see one that gets it done. This is an excerpt from an article I recently read:

“Lance took Jimmy V’s message and ran with it (ESPN Magazine)
By Chris Fowler

Lance Armstrong was suffering big time. He had collapsed into a hotel bathtub loaded with ice cubes. The tough facade, maintained for the crowds and cameras, had been stripped away. After 26.2 miles of punishment from New York City pavement, his legs screamed in pain. This was agony he never felt on the bike.

Those same legs dominated the planet’s supreme sporting test seven times and made it seem pretty easy.

I’ll never forget Lance strolling into the small, elegant bar in the Hotel du Crillon, fresh off the post-race podium on the Champs-Elysees in 2003. Just minutes earlier, he had finished his most demanding and frightening Tour de France. In three tumultuous weeks, he had fended off constant attacks from rivals, swerved down a steep grassy slope in the Alps to avoid a crash, and been slammed to the pavement after hooking his handlebar on a spectator’s souvenir.

And there he was in the bar, still in his cycling shorts and yellow jersey, settling into a red velvet chair to chat, downing a beer while his three kids climbed into his lap. The only evidence of the huge strain was the relief in his smile. But that’s how it always went: race like hell for three weeks, crush the competition, then party into the Parisian night.

So the e-mails after last November’s New York City Marathon were surprising. “Dude, it was pure hell!” … “The hardest thing ever.” ”

(more…)

My #1 Online Marketing Prediction for 2007 was that cause-related marketing, if done correctly, would have the most buzz and effectiveness. Dove continues to get accolades for its “Campaign for Real Beauty” and even investment banks like Goldman Sachs are doing the right thing by strong-arming energy utility bad boys to go green.

However, the one campaign that I was sure would out-perform all others in the cause-related marketing arena was the Red Campaign where dozens of major brands charge a premium for their red-colored products and give a significant portion of the proceeds to the AIDS effort in Africa. I may be wrong on this one. AdAge reports that “Bono & Co. Spend up to $100 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs’ Wrath” while only bringing in $18 million in revenue (the quick math shows a $82 million loss).