Lee Scott in his annual address to the National Retail Federation, noted that in the latest focus group of young shoppers, “Every  one of them had given something up, and they were talking about how good they felt about doing that.” Thus, he doesn’t see a rebound in sales any time soon.  Look at your life.  Are there things that you can give up?  Maybe it’s time to do a little housekeeping on your recurring expenses– see what you really need.  I’m not saying that you should be ascetic or start being frugal, even.  But maybe simplifying your life can be better.

I first heard of Yodle about 4 years ago, back when it was called NatPal, by Nathaniel Stevens out of UPenn, a friend of Brad Twohig, who is our joint friend.  Since then, I’ve seen the company grow from a few dozen clients to a reported 5,000, bring in a CEO (Court Cunningham), and a whole executive team.  Of anyone in the marketplace, I see these guys as the leaders so far, even though Webvisible and ReachLocal are far larger in terms of customer base, revenue, and staff.

The local advertising game is far from won—- the mainstream has yet to see a dominant player emerge, much less be able to recall any name brands.  As much as we’d like to believe the yellow pages will die an instant death, change occurs slowly.  And I see the most efficient player being able to win.  Yodle.com sells less on force of sales and more on the performance basis of calls driven.  Call tracking is powerful, as clients can see measurable impact.  But the game is early.  Nobody yet has figured out a true multi-channel marketing play that delivers pure ROI for local, even though the search engines, yellow pages, newspapers, radio stations, agencies, and other guys are trying to build their own and partner with others.  Expect to see some consolidation as a result of the economic downturn.

The eventual winners (and I believe there is room for many large players) will be the ones that deliver great value to the clients (transparent results and a large share of the client dollar actually going to marketing spend), plus take great care of their sales, operations, and engineering teams.  Social media is increasingly important, for example, Facebook advertising for local. Trouble now is that building such a team realistically costs $5-10MM, depending on how it’s done.  It takes, by my estimate, a team of two dozen folks for two years to build this out.  The fully loaded cost of a person is about $125k in a major metro.  Add in some marketing and sales expense and you can see how the numbers shake out.

Kudos to Yodle.com for being able to raise another round in a difficult environment.

CNN.com reported a story where Larry Flynt and some other porn executives are asking Congress for a bailout.  I suppose the folks making free porn are losing their shirts, literally?  If the adult industry, one of the largest and most lucrative segments of internet traffic, is asking for a handout, then things must really be bad.  Who will be next in line for free federal money?  We already know tobacco gets massive subsidies– $530 million from 1995 to 2006, for example.

How about making a resolution to not make any more resolutions? Seriously, when you example instances of when people fail versus succeed, a few key traits stand out. I’ll explain at the end of the article– but first… I read a study where patients were told by their doctors that if they didn’t stop smoking or change their diets that they had months to live. The doctors explain what their patients would experience with heart disease, lung cancer, and other complications over the remaining months if they didn’t drastically change. You know what happened?

In the majority of cases, people didn’t change. You would think that would be a wake-up call, if any. But a factual recitation about how smoking causes lung cancer is something we, as intelligent human beings, all know. Yet folks smoke anyway. Or they overeat at meals, overspend their credit line, choose bad boyfriends, and make a host of irrational decisions. Why do they fail here, even when literally threatened with a life and death situation?

They make a public commitment, they involve friends in achieving their goals, they have specific goals in different timeframes, they connect emotionally with their goals, and they have a feedback loop. Incidentally, aren’t those the same characteristics that make videos games highly addictive? Aren’t those the same dynamics that cause folks to spend hours on Facebook or (insert your favorite social media site here), coming back day after day? Imagine if you could harness that same level of dedication and enthusiasm in your job, your diet, or any other goal you want to achieve?

How about for the low, low price of $1,995? No, how about just $599 if you act in the next 30 minutes? Operators are standing by now. How about actually for free with no strings and no free set of Ginzu knives? The answer is sparkpeople.com. Sparkpeople.com is a community for folks who want to achieve their fitness and life balance goals. And with great fitness comes success in all other aspects of your life. This site hits upon all the game dynamics mentioned above. Chris Downie, who founded sparkpeople.com originally as a weight loss site, had the community of enthusiasts to prove it.

Instead of the traditional monthly attrition rate of 35% that you see in most programs, he’s less than 1/10th that rate. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris several times, as he explained these motivation principles to me– and it’s amazing how many people he’s been able to help because of this. Look out Tony Robbins, here comes Chris Downie! And what a humble fellow he is. He walk the talk with his own lifestyle. It reminds me of the obese CEO of a famous athletic shoe company or the CEO of a major search engine that didn’t even have a computer their first year. If you want to spark your lifestyle into success into the new year, tap into SparkPeople.com to make losing weight and getting fit as fun and addictive as Facebook.

There’s been recent debate from folks like Jim Cramer and Business Week on whether Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. Of course, it is!

• You don’t have your own account that holds the deposits you make.
• The money you put in now is used to pay off people who joined earlier.
• The number of people in the scheme must keep growing to pay off current needs.
• The “bubble” pops when we can’t find enough new people to put money in.

Charles Ponzi would be proud of folks like Uncle Sam and Bernard Madoff.  Ony we’re not talking about $50 billion, like Madoff’s scheme.  Guess how much of Social Security is unfunded– meaning that we don’t have the money to pay it off?  $4.3 trillion dollars according to the Social Security Administration themselves.  A trillion is a million million, if you can imagine that.

But unlike a regular Ponzi scheme, this is one that most of us are aware of, but think we can pass off to future generations– we have urgent things we need to spend money on now.  And we can reduce the burden by raising taxes, cutting the benefit amounts, and raising the minimum age to collect.  I personally think that Social Security should go back to what it was originally created for– as a safety net for folks who don’t have a safety net.

It was borne out the FDR era, where soldiers coming back from war were not guaranteed a job.  So instead of spending 20 years accumulating a pension at one company, you could move around and take a retirement with you.  But like car insurance, health insurance, or welfare– social security should pay out only when someone desperately needs it.  I know a lot of wealthy people who are collecting these checks– and they claim to deserve it, since they paid in.

But if social security were truly a safety net, instead of giving out cash, it would give vouchers for rent, food, and have welfare-like restrictions on it.  You want to talk about supply side (trickle down) economics?   Your hard-earned tax dollars are not being used to create jobs or build businesses– unless you count the lollipops and golf outings that Grandpa is spending your money on.

Time to halt this Ponzi scheme, which will, in turn, give each us more of our paychecks back.  And then we won’t need the social security, except for those folks that need the safety net.