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Today is "Black Friday," the beginning of the American Christmas shopping season, and one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year.

Some shoppers think it is called Black Friday because - to take advantage of the deals - you have to get up when it is still black outside...

Others believe it should be named Black and Blue Friday due to the brawls that breakout over limited quantities of this years' "hottest" toy or electronic item.

Retailers have traditionally provided special sales and incentives to drive traffic to their stores today with the hopes of turning a profit for the year; taking their sales books from "in the red" to "in the black."

Interesting, while today may be one of the highest traffic days, it traditionally is not the highest sales day. Discounts and special offers end up eroding margins.

Watching commercials during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (the Super Bowl for Christmastime) was interesting. Ads for super-early morning sales, deeper discounts, and extra-special offers gave a sense how anxious retailers are.

CNN Holiday shopping headlines tout: do-it-yourself gifts, getting resourceful with gift wrapping and low-cost decorations, cheaper gadgets in vogue this season, and that, this year, Santa is on a budget.

So, how much are customers willing to pour out of their wallets considering the financial unease and higher prices elsewhere?

Good timing too in reporting gas prices... Last week the average price for a gallon of gas dropped under 2-bucks. The lowest it has been in 46 months. Just in time for gassing up for holiday shopping.

It will be interesting to see the reports by the end of today and on Monday.

Did your company engage in out-of-the-usual tactics to drive traffic and sales? Higher than normal discounts? More than normal value-added items?

I wouldn’t dare try to keep you from your friends, family, and food today.  Just be careful not to end up losing control and bursting that stomach!

The pilgrims were thankful after traveling to an unknown land - a land that did not have hospitals, transportation, housing or schools. They came with a dream and a hope for a better life. And they built it. Would we be so brave today? Here’s to all of today’s leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators and activists who [...]

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Well it seems that the battle with the watchdogs is not only on the ESPs and clients but also on the ISPs themselves now days. Interesting take on this and wondering how Microsoft and Verizon are going to handle this. Will they shrug it off? Or will they take it seriously as all of us do? 

 

Microsoft is listed fifth in the Top 10 list of the worst spam service ISPs compiled by Spamhaus.org.

Spammers are advertising links to sites that “peddle fake pharmacy products, porn, and Nigerian 419 scams” on Microsoft’s Live.com and Livefilestore.com sites because they know that the Microsoft sites won’t get blocked by antispam groups, writes Brian Krebs on his Security Fix Blog at the Washington Post.

Spamhaus has been alerting Microsoft to the problem for some time, but to no avail, Richard Cox, Spamhaus’ chief information officer, told Krebs. Other security companies, including McAfee and Marshal, have also been warning about increases in spam and scams on Microsoft-hosted sites.

 

 

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Marketing is the interface a company builds to interact with the marketplace and the customer base. The marketing group, combined with the sales force, is the point in the company where the market understanding resides. This should be the group that drives the company, that sells the marketing vision and message internally, and if that is not happening or doesn't seem appropriate, there is something seriously wrong.

Big M Marketing focuses on the broader more strategic use of marketing have having solid processes in place to take advantage of this. I sought the advice of Dave Guzeman president of Mindpik and author of a recent book called - Driving Marketing Success with Big M Marketing.

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About Dave

Dave Guzeman Mindpik’s Mastermind, has combined sophisticated technical savvy with keen marketing instincts for over 30 years. A veteran Silicon Valley marketer, Guzeman founded the Mindpik consultancy in 1988 to develop sales and marketing programs for new product launches, startups and turnarounds. Guzeman directs all of Mindpik's efforts to build business plans for capital acquisition or sales of companies or products to targeted markets. Mindpik clients have included semiconductor powerhouses like Signetics (now Philips) to inventive start-ups like Music Semiconductor and u-Nav microprocessors.

Prior to starting Mindpik, Guzeman held executive marketing positions including VP of Marketing at Zilog and VP of Marketing & Sales at ZyMOS. At the latter, he was responsible for introducing the industry's first PC clone chipset, a release that triggered the PC clone avalanche.

Guzeman started the Advertising and PR department at Intel in the mid-seventies where he worked with the company's founding partners to launch the legendary 8080 microprocessor which set the architecture and instruction set Intel still uses today.

Guzeman came to Intel from Teledyne Semiconductor, his first stop in Silicon Valley, where he served as the Digital Product marketing Manager after graduation with a BS in Physics from Aurora University in Illinois.