Cyber Thursday Sets Record!

A new online record has been set. On the new Cyber Monday, er Cyber Thursday (December 6), comScore reports $800 million in online sales as holiday buying shifts from traditional bricks and mortar stores to the ‘Net.  That’s a $67 million increase over the day after Thanksgiving (Cyber Monday) this year.

Last year’s biggest online sales day was Wednesday, December 13, when sales totaled $667 million.

But we might set another record this year – maybe a day this week.  eBay employees have coined the term "Green Monday" for the 2nd
Monday of December.  eBay’s biggest days each of the last 3 years were
the 2nd Monday.  Might the rest of the online community see record sales the same day?  Or maybe it will be today.  Today is December 13th.

Published reports say online sales are expected to soar 20% this year.  Compare that sales gain to offline retailers.  Chicago-based ShopperTrak says sales fell nearly 3% for the week ending December 8th and store traffic was down 12% from the same period last year.  Sales were down 4.4% the week before and many analysts can’t remember when sales declined 2 consecutive weeks during the holiday season.

The National Retail Federation is forecasting the smallest holiday sales gain in 5 years – just 4%

— Kurt Scholle
   www.webasylum.com

Awesome Example of Guerrilla Marketing

I was reading the paper this morning about Oprah’s campaigning over the weekend for Barack Obama in Columbia, South Carolina.  29,000 people showed up and it’s estimated that Obama will not only close the 2-3% gap with Hillary in early voting states, but surpass her.

But what was really interesting is that Obama’s campaign distributed cards to the attendees with the phone numbers for 4 registered voters, along with a script, and asked the attendees to use their cell phones to solicit support for Obama.

That’s Awesome!

Can you imagine the impact of having thousands of spectators, turned into volunteers, whipped into a frenzy, calling 4 (or more) people to tell them what’s going on and asking for support?  Think of the impact on awareness.  Think of what it would have cost to run a more traditional phone bank to reach the same 100,000+ people.  Think of how much longer it would have taken.  Think of the impact on Obama’s competition.

Apparently, the Guinness Book of World Records will list the stunt in their book as the world’s largest phone banking.

And it’s classic Guerrilla Marketing – using low and no-cost techniques to market your business, organization or self.  There are a number of great marketing books listed to the right if you’d like to learn what a little creativity and effort can do for you.

The lesson here is how can you get the buzz going?  How can you turn your ‘peeps’ into raving fans who will refer you?

— Kurt Scholle
    Web Asylum

10 Passwords to Avoid

Here’s something I learned while looking up other things…

PC Magazine has released a list of the Top 10 passwords people use.  These are certainly not very imaginative..  You should not use these!!!

#10 (your first name)
#9 blink182
#8 password1
#7 myspace1
#6 monkey
#5 let me in
#4 abc123
#3 qwerty
#2 123456
#1 password

I may have told you that the name Web Asylum came in 1996 from putting something, long forgotten, into an anagram generator.  2 of the words that came out were web and asylum.  Before we discovered those words, we also had something come back with the 2 words "Angela’s crotch."  It was an amusing surprise, but certainly not something to name our new company.  But we did use ‘cr0tch’ as our first company password. (Note the zero replacing the ‘o’)