Bullies, bites, and buggy whips

WEDNESDAY’S WEEKLY READER

New to adMISSIONs: a weekly sampler of tasty news morsels caught in my net as I troll the web, delivered fresh to you:

95% of customers: a waste of money

4-5% of customers account for most of your business?  That’s what Daisy Whitney says in OMMA magazine. “It’s not what is most efficient, it’s what is most effective. It’s not how big your share of voice is, it’s how important your customers think you are.” Roy H. Williams developed a formula for quantifying effectiveness in his bestselling Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. My partner David Young explains application of Roy’s Advertising Performance Equation.

SEO is killing the web

That’s the upshot of this article by John Dvorak. Rampant SEO strategies, he says, ruins the search experience for users, requiring the search engine folks to constantly work on countermeasures to minimize the impact of SEO techniques.

TV Everywhere bullies you into buying it all

Cable is like a buggy-whip giant in the early days of the car biz: Comcast’s TV Everywhere product offers shows airing on cable and over-the-air TV networks. The catch: you must subscribe to both Comcast and its Internet service. To get what you want, you gotta buy what you won’t use.

You thought we were done with Top 10’s?

Springwise has gathered what they think are the Top Ten business ideas for 2010. Take it from the source: they’re based in Amsterdam. I’m still waiting for wooden shoes to take off.

Watch your mouth: words to avoid in 2010

Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

Cool app: Visual Thesaurus

A graphical thesaurus displaying unexpected word connections. Great brainstorming tool. Confession: I’m a word geek and love their Word of the Day. While most of the words fly the face of the “use common words uncommonly” rule, stories behind words expose new ideas. If only they had an iPhone app.

Only one thing worse than a foot in your mouth

Sporting over 145 million views, this is the most viewed clip of all time on YouTube. So simple, yet strangely compelling. Consider that next time you’re cooking up an online video: keep it simple and authentic. Unless you want to sound like this guy.