Everyone is clueless (Marketing)

The problem with “everyone” is that in order to reach everyone or teach everyone or sell to everyone, you need to so water down what you’ve got you end up with almost nothing.

Everyone doesn’t go to the chiropractor, everyone doesn’t give to charity, everyone has never been to Starbucks. Everyone, in fact, lives a decade behind the times and needs hundreds of impressions and lots of direct experience before they realize something is going on.

You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone. [read]

The unclicking 84% – Online Marketing

Seth Godin – Mark points us to this great set of stats.

Basically, all of the clicks for all the ads online come from only 16% of the surfers, and most of them come from just 4% of all internet users.

So, if you optimize your ads for clicks, it means you’re ignoring a huge population.

If your business is built around the kind of person who clicks, you win. If it isn’t, you either need to not buy ads online or buy ads optimized for attention and familiarity, not clicks.

Imagine that only left-handed people clicked on ads (it’s about the same percent). What are you going to do if you make a product for the right-handed portion of the population?

It’s okay to make an ad that isn’t easy to measure. If it works, that’s enough.

Seth Godin

App Store officially passes 100,000 app mark

We’ve known it was coming for a while now, but the milestone has finally been passed: Apple announced on Wednesday that the App Store now boasts more than 100,000 applications available for download. And download the people have, more than two billion times in 77 countries.

As you might expect, Phil Schiller weighed in on the announcement, calling the App Store “a major differentiator” for iPhone and iPod touch customers, of which there are more than 50 million. (Schiller didn’t comment on rumors that he had also asked his staff to address him as “Major Differentiator.”)

Apple’s App Store has seen tremendous growth, having only been open for business for just over a year and a quarter. The store hit one billion downloads about six months ago, at which point it had more than 35,000 applications. In September, when it hit two billion downloads, Apple said the store then boasted 85,000 applications. [read]

Verizon to Double Early Termination Fee [Rumor]

Now, you can sign a new contract with Verizon, pick any phone and then ditch the service for $175. But according to a leaked doc, those days are numbered.

Beginning 11/15, early terminations on contracts with unspecified “advanced device”(s) will be subject to a fee of $350. And while that policy might slow ebay entrepreneurs just looking to make a few easy bucks on a resold Blackberry, it’s devastating to the average guy who just wants to ditch his contract early.

The good news, however, is that fee will drop by $10 every month. But still, that’s a $110 termination fee in month 23 of a 2-year contract…which is clearly absurd. [BGR]

Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.

Report: Universal Music CEO Morris To Step Aside

Universal Music Group’s Doug Morris will step aside next year and international chief Lucian Grainge will assume the role of CEO, according to BusinessWeek. Morris, who is 71 this month, will remain as Chairman and reportedly has no plans to retire.

Doug Morris has seen Universal through some of the rockiest times in the history of the music industry retaining the company’s position as the world’s largest label group.  After making the same post-Napster missteps as others in the industry, he has pushed the company’s moves into digital while at the same time remaining an outspoken critic of iTune’s dominance.   A recent initiative under Morris’ reign is the VEVO partnership which sees Universal joining with Sony to retain more control of and revenue from online music video.

image via Wired
:: Source: Hypebot.com

Wal-Mart announces second round of toy price cuts

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wal-Mart Stores Inc on Monday announced its second round of price cuts on toys as the world’s biggest retailer backs up its intention to be the “price leader” this holiday shopping season.

U.S. Walmart stores are cutting prices on 100 toys, like the Buzz Lightyear talking action figure and Star Wars light sabers, by roughly 20 percent to 30 percent.

The cuts are in addition to ones the retailer implemented at the end of September, when it began selling 100 toys for $10 each.

The new prices will be available through December 25 or while supplies last.

Wal-Mart has vowed to be the “price leader” this holiday season, and announced plans on October 21 to cut prices every week until Christmas to fend off rivals and win over shoppers. [read]

Apple Wants iTunes to Replace Your Cable Box for 30 Bucks a Month [Rumor]

Apple’s apparently pitching to networks a subscription plan that would deliver all your TV shows through iTunes for $30 a month, with the goal of launching it next year.

 

But don’t hold your breath on it happening yet: Peter Kafka has “yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment.” As he points out, while networks are constantly looking for new revenue, like those asshole aliens in Independence Day moving from world to world consuming every natural resource, they’re nervous about the idea for a lot of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with the icky, sticky relationships between networks and cable operators, where everybody’s worried about losing out as people start to watch more and more TV content online, not in their living room—where streaming video eats up bandwidth, and advertising revenues aren’t nearly as rich (which is why Hulu wants to figure out new ways to get you to pay). [read]

Help your customers avoid taking responsibility

It’s interesting to see that people are much better at putting up with things that happen to them than they are at living with the consequences of a bad choice.

When you can blame someone else (or the gods of spite, chance and bad luck) it’s emotionally safer than it is to acknowledge you made a lousy choice.

If the weather is freakishly bad on your vacation, you can embrace pity from your friends, and spend your angst cursing the storms. [read]

The tech behind U2’s record-smashing tour

PASADENA, Calif.–If you were one of the 96,000 people packed into the Rose Bowl Sunday night for the U2 concert–said to be the largest concert ever held here–you were sharing the experience with at least a few other fans off-site.

There’s no way to know yet how many exactly, but it’s safe to say millions of people around the world were also watching the concert live on YouTube, a potentially server-crashing Webcast that may have been the biggest live-stream yet.

For months, the band has been on tour with its U2 360 concerts. And to top off the grand claims, it has been called the biggest rock tour in history, at least as measured by the size and cost of its infrastructure–more than $750,000 per show, according to Rolling Stone.

Only days ago, the band announced that it would share the Rose Bowl concert live, with fans across the globe. Just before the band came on stage, a roadie calling himself Rocco got up in front of the crowd of 96,000 and said, “Tonight, you are the ones making history,” shouting out that those in attendance would be joined by viewers in “North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica.” [read]

How to Carry Your Office on a Stick (USB Flash Drive)

As USB flash drives continue to get faster and provide increasing amounts of storage capacity, you can use them for more than just backing up files and documents. You can actually run a ton of applications right from your flash drive, which can come in handy when you’re on the road outside your office or home. There are some popular suites of flash drive apps, such as PortableApps, which we’ve covered before. There recently announced freeware portable apps for popular packages such as Google Chrome, Skype and even uTorrent. However, PortableApps is not the only game in town these days.

NirLauncher

NirLauncher is another impressive suite of portable apps that are easy to launch from your USB flash drive. It includes the entire collection of useful Systernals troubleshooting tools. The author makes the process of setting up all of these apps easy, with a file named systernals.nlp that you simply copy to the Systernals folder. [read]