September 22, 2009, San Diego, CA – Today, Prospect Smarter, Inc. will be unveiling the release version of their breakthrough web application enthusem.com at the prestigious DEMOfall 09 conference in San Diego, CA. Enthusem.com, which has attracted thousands of users during its beta release, makes it fast and easy to send REAL printed greeting cards that seamlessly integrate online content.

The most recent release also provides a public API that makes it simple for any Internet-connected application to send printed postal mail that ties in Web content. The API is attracting software developers who are extending the possibilities for sending printed postal mail from the Web, desktop applications and mobile devices.

DEMOfall 09, an invitation-only event, has consistently been a forum to showcase new software applications with strong commercial potential. Among the current stars that have come out of DEMO are: TiVo, Salesforce.com and E*Trade.

Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences stated, “I received one of Enthusem’s beautiful printed greeting cards in the mail from company CEO Steve Tingiris. His message stood out from the hundreds of messages that I get each day, and I easily connected with the fun personality of the company and with Steve’s own vision for connecting real postal mail to today’s online world. That simple greeting card convinced me that Enthusem should be at DEMO. Like any breakthrough idea, Enthusem combines familiar elements in one place to make it easy for consumers. Enthusem will be a hit with our attendees.”

Enthusem cards contain a personal message and image, so the cards are printed one-at-a-time and mailed every business day that the postal service operates. The printed greeting cards are mailed in a premium vellum envelope with first class postage speeding them along to just about any place in the world. There is no sign-up fee or monthly subscription for personal enthusem accounts. Users simply create an account at www.enthusem.com and pay for cards as they send them or purchase credits in bulk at a discounted rate.

Haneke Design is using the API to build the first iPhone app that will send printed greeting cards with online attachments, “We’re extremely impressed with how easy the enthusem API was to work with. We completed our iPhone app a month ahead of schedule and it should be available in the AppStore shortly,” says Jody Haneke, President of Haneke Design.

Box.net also used the Enthusem API with their OpenBox platform to allow their users to create printed greeting cards from the images in their Box.net accounts. "The goal of our OpenBox platform is to leverage third-party services that let our users do more with the content they store on Box. Providing access to enthusem's on-demand greeting card service allows the 50,000 businesses that use Box.net to leverage their creative assets to connect with customers, prospects and partners in a more individualized way," said Karen Appleton, vice president of business development at Box.net. Enthusem’s fully-documented API can be found at developer.enthusem.com.

Founder and CEO Steve Tingiris says:

“Getting someone’s attention these days is no easy thing, especially with crowded email inboxes and spam filters. At enthusem we’re changing that. We’ve been hard at work, re-inventing the printed greeting card to blend the best of what online and print media have to offer because, all too often, electronic messages get lost in the crowd or aren’t personal enough, and sending postal mail the old way is just plain inconvenient and out of step with how we communicate today. We have had a lot of fun interacting with our user community and adding in the features they want, while staying true to our core principles of simplicity.” Tingiris continues, “Our new public API is a set of simple XML web services that are as easy for software developers to use as the website is for end users. This means that any Internet connected application can easily send printed postal mail that seamlessly integrates web content. This opens up thousands of opportunities for us to scale the company in partnership with other consumer web applications, CRM systems, non-profits and companies who want to increase response rates and communicate in a fresh way.”

About Prospect Smarter Inc.

Prospect Smarter develops software to help businesses and sales professionals stand out and sell more. Since 1998 Prospect Smarter has developed dozens of custom and commercial software systems to automate measure and maximize marketing and sales effectiveness. Prospect Smarter’s most recent project is enthusem.com which allows user to send printed greeting cards from the Web that are extended with online content; blending the best of what digital and print media offer. To learn more visit www.enthusem.com.

For more information contact: Angela Medlar Phone: (800) 709-1755 E-mail: angela@enthusem.com

About DEMO:

Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.

8/18/09: Steve Tingiris of Enthusem.com talks about turning the sales funnel “upside-down” 

Our first guest of the morning was Steve Tingiris of an innovative startup enthusem.com which allows users to create, personalize and send customized printed greeting cards to their contacts. The enthusem.com tools even provide the means for users to provide an online attachment for each printed greeting card and track the number of times it’s accessed. But the most remarkable thing about what Enthusem does isn’t in the tools themselves, it’s in how they can be incoporated into an effective selling strategy.

Steve talked about how the traditional model of a “sales funnel”, where businesses market to a large market segment and then filter down to the prospects most interested, is an outdated approach to small business marketing. He instead recommends turning the funnel “upside-down” by focusing energy on a very few targeted outstanding prospects. We definitely recommend checking out enthusem.com and all you Twitter geeks out there should check out the innovative social media applications of their program.

Listen Now

Social media is causing a fundamental shift in the way businesses engage and communicate with prospects and customers.

The traditional marketing approach where you get your message in front of thousands of people to net a handful of customers isn’t working the way it used to. The funnel – as this approach is often referred to - is broken.

The funnel is broken for two reasons. First, we all get too many electronic messages. Over the past decade it’s gotten so easy to communicate electronically and our social networks have grow so much that most can’t keep up with the number of daily emails, text messages, instant messages, direct message and all the other messages we get.

The second reason the marketing funnel approach is broken is that social media is reminding us that we prefer to communicate with real people on a one-to-one basis. However, most marketing communications are still generated by databases and aren’t able to measure up to the truly personal nature of social media.

So for marketing, sales and business development professionals the challenge is to figure out how to stand out from the all the electronic messages being sent and how to make a personal connection.

By Steve Tingiris

Article originally posted at http://www.findandconvert.com/old-school-approach-social-networking/

The enthusem community is officially launched!

 Visit http://support.enthusem.com/ to check it out for tech support, faqs, demos, system updates, known issues, add a feature request and tips & tricks. We're constantly working on building this section out and welcome your feedback and comments!

Enthusem makes sending personalized PRINTED greeting cards as easy as sending an email and you can learn everything you need to know to get the most out of the system in less than 30 minutes! This training session will cover:

AppVita, "Discovers web apps that just make life easier" and today they discovered Enthusem! We were very excited to see that we received 5 stars.

"On the front page of the Enthusem site is the claim “greeting cards reinvented.” That’s a tall claim, especially with so many e-card sites available on the web. But Enthusem is not a traditional web-based greeting card site, where you send a greeting card to someone’s email address. Instead, Enthusem is a web-based app that sends physical greeting cards to a person’s postal mail address."

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Genius Idea: Enthusem places a digital twist on the classic greeting card. Unlike e-cards, enthusem actually has a physical greeting card that it prints and sends to whoever you want - friends, family, coworkers, etc. The card can be designed with custom language, photos, and images. It even comes in a nifty translucent envelope so that the recipient is immediately interested.

That’s not where Enthusem’s strength lies, though. Enthusem includes the ability to add a digital component to the card, using a URL and a pickup code, which the recipient can type in online to see a custom video, read an extended note, or listen to a meaningful mp3 that you uploaded. The intent is to catch the eye and the attention of the recipient more than a simple email or e-card could do...

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Is the goal of your online social networking efforts to grow your business? If so, at some point your followers, friends or fans will need to know you as more than just another one of their many online “peeps.” The challenge is the average person is bombarded daily by electronic messages from literally hundreds of people who are part of their ever growing online network of contacts.

Now, I’m no Guy Kawasaki – not by a long shot. But even still I recently counted over 173 electronic messages that I received in a single day. Even worse, I only counted emails, text messages, twitter DMs and replies, Facebook messages and Linkedin group communications. Beyond that there are blog replies, voice mails and various messages from other online networks that I’m a part of. Now, again, I’m no Guy Kawasaki and chances are you aren’t either. However, I’m betting you’re facing the same barrage of online communications. Am I right? Consider it for a second. How many electronic messages do you get a day?

Now let me ask another question. How many personal messages do you get via postal mail? You remember postal mail right? It’s the printed stuff that’s sent with a stamp. Now for the purposes of my question I’m talking about truly personal postal mail. Communications that were written and sent by a person you know or know of – database driven direct mail with your name on it doesn’t count. How many of those are you going to have to sift through today? I’m sure you got as many personal postal messages as you did online ones right? <sarcasm>  No? OK than, how many pieces of personal postal mail did you receive this month or this year?

Just in case it’s not totally obvious where I’m going with this I’ll spell it out for you in this paragraph. The average person today gets less than a dozen (yea that’s 12) personal postal messages in an ENTIRE YEAR. By contrast, the average person gets dozens, and in many cases hundreds of electronic messages DAILY. If your hope is that you’ll be able to truly capture the attention and differentiate yourself with another electronic message (and you’re not Guy Kawasaki) the odds are stacked against you in a big way. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to make a personal connection with an electronic message. However, if you got a personal printed note mailed to you from one of your Twitter followers is there any chance that might stand out more so than say a Twitter direct message? Of course it would because it’s rare and unique.

Now, this isn’t just a theory. I’ve been sending thank you cards and printed notes to contacts I’ve made online for some time and the response has been nothing short of astounding. How astounding? Well, when I take the time to send a truly personal message better than 60% of the recipients respond. Also, for the record, the first time I mail someone it’s usually just after I’ve connected with them online for the first time.  So, initially these aren’t close contacts. For example, I’ll commonly send an “I’m following you on Twitter” card to people that I follow on Twitter that I’d like to connect with off-line.

I suppose if everyone starts doing what I’m doing my postal messages may not work as well in the future. But for now, using personal postal mail to communicate with online contacts is extremely effective and MUST be considered if you’re serious about your social networking strategy.