It's Tally Tuesday!

In the wake of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even the upstart Buy Nothing Day, what phraseology helped consumers make sense of last Tuesday? Call it Tally Tuesday. But how great it would be to see a breakout of data for money spent by consumers on the four days following Thanksgiving.

First reports said online spending Monday rose 21% over last year. Cyber Monday has roots in the frothy dotcom build-up of the late 1990s, which included the $400 Amazon stock price prediction. Surely, modern savvy online holiday shoppers were not waiting for an official Cyber Monday to start buying. No, they clicked all extended weekend long (some in their pajamas), avoiding 4 a.m. rushes to the mall and parking lot anxiety. Cyber Monday isn't really targeted at them. It's for Black Friday shoppers who struck out at Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target -- or need a spending outlet while in the office. One word that you'll never see attached to today: Returns.

Those come after Christmas, as in Returns Wednesday.

Video: Powerful Storytelling

As a follow-up to my Nov. 17 post, I noticed that San Diego-based Slacker has posted additional Portable Player product photographs (a handful of new UI screen shots) to its website. But it still needs more to tell a great story. To their credit, the Slacker team is including a link in customer emails to video from an October segment that CNN ran on the company.

So why not use the power of video to your advantage? PR is one way. Another is pure marketing. An online demo (see Sirius Stiletto 2) can reinforce upcoming Slacker Portable Player reviews from tech writers, most of whom have written with excitement about the company's business model since its March launch.

With a million registered online users, Slacker has an audience ready to receive the product message through a richer online medium. Consumers can't touch or experience the product yet in retail stores, so trust and loyalty must be earned in other ways.

Internet Radio Meets Digital Player

It took longer than predicted, but availability for portable digital music devices from Slacker was announced this week in advance of Black Friday, the largest U.S. consumer spending day of the year. Slacker said it's taking online pre-orders for players that will ship in mid-December. But no retail sales yet where a hands-on experience is how Apple has done marvelously with the iPod and iPhone. Instead, Slacker will market directly to their 1 million desktop radio subscribers first. One executive said the company hopes to sell 100,000 units. First thing, they should start posting more product photgraphy ASAP. The image above is making the rounds this week. Deeper in the Slacker website are photographs of users and recording artists holding the players, but you have to hunt to find them. Competing for mindshare in a space with Apple and Microsoft's Zune requires loyal consumers or a product too hot to ignore. We need to see more of it.

Dick Pound and WADA

Dick Pound draws blood, ripping professional baseball on its drug testing program. Top section from tomorrow's NYT from a story out of Madrid, where doping experts are meeting: After years of criticizing Major League Baseball for what he called useless, toothless drug-testing policies, Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, chastised the sport again Friday, saying that Barry Bonds’s indictment on perjury charges confirmed that the league’s doping problems were “out of control. The professional leagues have consistently denied they are cheating their public and putting their athletes at risk by saying there is no problem, there is no drug use,” Pound said. “When forced to acknowledge that there is, and these investigations are starting to show that it is really widespread, they are turning the other way. We’ve seen this before, in cycling, and we all know what happened to that sport — it nearly destroyed itself.” Here is story in L.A. Times on Pound's comments

MLB : Messy Little Business

Bud Selig must want to spit. Once he opens his eyes, that is. After beaming at the World Series about how Major League Baseball had its best year at the gate, he now must go silent on the Barry Bonds matter. Asterisks, denials, hypocrisy. Professional baseball knows it needs steroids to go away, with Barry as the black hat. Professional cycling is years ahead of American sports in its fight against doping and its reconciliation with fans and sponsors. An ugly chapter, but the right thing to do. MLB needs to adopt a real doping / testing program so real athletic talent is rewarded.