Many experts believe that with the proliferation of technology and the Internet, traditional salesmanship has lost that personal touch. We have seen the steady decline of institutions such as the weekly milk man, and even the occasional visit from an adorable Girl Scout selling cookies seems to hearken back nostalgically to a lost age of door-to-door salesmanship.

However, one new development appears to be bringing back the idea of one-on-one micromarketing: Twitter.

While Twitter certainly lacks the face to face interaction, it does provide a way for companies to reach out to individual consumers, garner their feedback, and engage them in a dialogue (limited to 140 characters, but a dialogue, nonetheless.) Twitter allows salesmen to hear what customers are saying directly and offers them a chance to respond in real time.

As outdated as the old image of a cheesy door-to-door salesman may be, it may help marketers to borrow some of the same concepts when using Twitter for their businesses, namely:

1) Every customer counts and has a voice.

2) The best new ideas for a company often come straight from the consumer.

3) Customers enjoy that extra personal touch.

For those of you old fogeys who have yet to hop on the Twitter bandwagon, it may help to just think of yourselves as a new and improved (and less invasive) version of the traditional door-to-door salesmen of the past….

With literally zero dollars and a bit of creative thinking, you can use the internet to create hugely effective marketing platforms. Just think of yourself as the author, and the internet as the publisher. Now, you need to know how and what to publish online so that you get found. Enter, this blog post! You’re already taking a step in the right direction!

First, wrap your head around the concept of “Inbound Marketing.” Hubspot.com will be your best resource here. You can no longer push your idea on consumers. Your company must put ideas and content out in the marketplace and let leads and customers come to them. To get started, create a blog! A blog will be your best bet for attracting search engine hits and pulling net surfers to your idea using informative and creative content.

Next, get in the social media game. It’s no longer an option; you need to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social networks so that you can communicate quickly and effectively with your audience. This is just another one of the many free platforms that will help you get found online.

Next, put together some webinars. Although not all webinar software is free, at  Shoeboxed.com, we started with a free trial for a webinar company and were able to generate enough traffic and content during the free trial alone to make it worth our while. Host as many webinars on as many different topics as you can. If they’re informative, internet traffic will trickle in. To find out how to make good webinars, watch some online. Sign up for Shoeboxed’s next webinar to see how we do it: www.shoeboxed.com/webinar.

Once you have a website up and running, pay special attention to your landing pages. The language and style of these pages are crucial for capturing leads and converting them online. There are unending resources and blogs out there that cover landing page tips and pointers.

Finally, get really creative. I mean, really creative. Try something quirky or crazy like a media stunt, viral video, crazy T-shirt promotion, online voting competition or gift giveaways. The sky is the limit for cheap online marketing if you really put your mind to it.

For more in depth reading on topics like low/no budget online marketing, visit hubspot.com, read Seth Godin’s books and blogs, check out problogger.com, Dosh Dosh, and many more. Most importantly, don’t give up. Inbound marketing is cheap, and if you get your content out there, your customers will come to you.

KFC Grilled Chicken FAIL

So when you saturate American media with promises of free chicken, you migh expect that a lot of people are going to take you up on the offer. Apparently, though, KFC was unable to deliver on their promise to give out free chicken to anyone who printed off an online coupon.

Due to “overwhelming response”, KFC ended its free chicken promotion that was supposed to continue over the next few days. Instead, you can redeem you coupon for a raincheck that will let you get free chicken on another day in the future.

No word yet on what Oprah thinks of the “overwhelming response.” She’ll be delivering the commencement address at Duke University this year, and since we’re located just a couple of blocks away, we’ll try to ask her. Think we can get close?

Also, if you’re interested, here is the statement from the KFC president:
We are so sorry, but due to the overwhelming response to our FREE Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal coupon, we can no longer redeem the free coupon at this time. But we will honor our commitment to giving you a free Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal.

Please visit a participating KFC restaurant for a rain check form. Complete the form, attach your original coupon , and give it to the KFC restaurant manager or postmark per the form’s instructions, by May 19, 2009, and we’ll send you a rain check for your free Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal at a later date, plus a free Pepsi with our compliments. Your participating KFC restaurant will provide you with the form you need.

Please note that the redemption periods of the rain checks will vary. All other terms and conditions of the original free Kentucky Grilled Chicken coupon will apply.

Thank you for your understanding,
Roger Eaton

Please feel free to submit a design for our new envelopes. If your design is selected, you’ll win the following things:

1. $100 cash
2. 2 months free of Mail-In Classic
3. Fame: Your name and/or design company will be printed on each envelope sent to our users.

Here’s what we would need from you:

1. The envelope design must be for a 9.5 x 12.5 inch envelope. The back side has a flap (printable) that is 2 x 12.5 inches.
2. You may only use white, Shoeboxed blue (Pantone 801 or approx #00aadc) and grayscale / black.
3. Please use one of these two logos on the front of the envelope, preferably in the upper left: White or Blue.
4. Ideally, the back of the envelope will include some text/graphic explanation of the service that Shoeboxed provides: (Send us your receipts / business cards in our prepaid envelopes, we scan them and enter data into your online account, you access them online to stay organized, and we mail you a new envelope for your next batch of documents).
5. Submit final design as an Illustrator .ai file.

ALL SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE ON MONDAY APRIL 27 to sonny@team.shoeboxed.com. The winner will be announced on Wednesday April 29. Have fun and take all of the artistic license you would like!

See our dedicated web page for full details.

Shoeboxed Internet March Mayhem e-Tournament

Some match-ups show the entire number of votes logged for a particular contest, but we are only counting the votes cast before the 5:00 p.m. EST deadline that passed on March 27. We’ll make sure to get the true vote counts on there soon, but just in case there is any discrepancy, that is why.

Make sure to vote your favorites into the Sweet Sixteen. And, if you’re just joining the fun, here is a summary of what’s happened so far. You may learn a bit about how to keep your favorites in and get some explanations for some of the amazing upsets that have happened so far!

So here’s a recap, with a look to Round 2:

Web Celebs Bracket

At the top of the Web Celeb bracket, 16 seed Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret pulled off a big upset over Robert Scoble, the first seed. We saw people really rallying around Warren in the last day of voting and he overcame a big deficit. People love PostSecret it seems!

We also saw Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo, barely beat Peter Shankman in the first round. Despite some Twittering for Shankman’s cause, the HARO founder was not able to overcome Calacanis’ name recognition and fan base. Calacanis will face Warren in the next round.

One of the most intense matchups of the first round was Guy Kawasaki versus Chris Pirillo. The matchup was neck and neck for a long time, but Pirillo fans prevailed, and put their man into Round 2 with a late surge.

Despite how many people posted tweets about their votes in Round 1, Twitter founder Evan Williams was unable to advance, losing at the hands of LonelyGirl15, the YouTube star. She’ll face Chris Pirillo in the next round in a battle of the video stars.

Michael Arrington called March Mayhem an “absurd contest” and probably hasn’t changed his mind, since he lost to Chris Brogan in the first round. Brogran will face Squidoo founder Seth Godin, who beat Grant Robertson in his first-round matchup.

Kevin Rose, a Web Celeb with a huge following, beat Pete Cashmore of Mashable and will face Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani in the next round. Trapani upset major Web Celeb Perez Hilton in her matchup. If Kevin Rose starts tweeting to his 300,000+ followers about this tournament, he’ll be hard to beat in this bracket.

Social Media Bracket

It’s probably not too incredible that the Social Media Bracket produced some upsets, because social media sites often have lots of power to drive traffic online.

Kwippy was able to rally it’s loyal fans to eek out a victory against the mighty Facebook. No effort from Facebook itself led to its demise.

Tumblr had a late surge in votes to overcome Twitter. This traffic really could have come from anywhere, but Twitter was one of the favorites to win it all, considering so much Twitter marketing was used to promote voting on this very contest. Tumblr will face Kwippy in Round 2.

If you’ve ever wondered whether anyone uses Freindster anymore, you can rest assured that there are. Friendster beat Flickr and earned a spot to face Del.icio.us in the next round. Del.icio.us beat out Wikipedia.

Identi.ca has really been the Cinderella of this whole tournament. By posting a link to the voting ON THEIR HOMEPAGE (!), they were able to drive enough traffic to beat out LinkedIn, a far larger social network. They’ll face social news powerhouse Digg in the second round. Digg easily beat 3rd seeded MySpace.

In the rest of the bracket, Jaiku beat out Ning and Brighkite pulled a major upset over YouTube due to lots of loyal fans showing up to vote!

Start-Ups Bracket

In the first match-up, FreshBooks overcame a late surge in MFBP votes to win narrowly. MFBP sent out an email to all of their users at the last minute to get more votes, but came up just short.

BatchBlue also drummed up some last minute support via Twitter to narrowly beat out Mahalo. BatchBlue will face off against FreshBooks in the second round.

Shoeboxed, the host, won over Storenvy, and will face off against PlaceVine, who surged in the end to beat out everybody’s favorite music player, Grooveshark.

Outright will face off against MailChimp in the second round after beating out SimpleFeed. JigSaw could never muster up enough votes to beat out MailChimp, who used Twitter and other techniques to move into the next round.

FourSquare had an impressive showing against BrightCove and emerged victories. They will face Foodzie in the next round, who organized an amazing comeback over Evernote on the last day of voting. Evernote is still awesome, though!

Blogs Bracket

The match-up between the Huffington Post and Consumerist was neck and neck for the whole first round, until Consumerist pulled ahead at the end. They will face Seth’s Blog in the next round after Dosh Dosh wasn’t able to pull enough votes together to advance.

Lifehacker easily beat Engadget, and will face off against another gadget blog, Gizmodo in the next round. Gizmodo beat out TechCrunch in a shocker.

Gawker beat out Mashable and Problogger beat out TMZ.com. It would have been awesome to see Gawker vs. TMZ, but Problogger may be too strong.

Daily Kos surged ahead of Ars Technica at the end of the voting period, and will face VFTW in Round 2. In perhaps the warmest embrace of this tournament, VFTW rallied its readers to vote for it in a dedicated blog post. With no American Idol episode during this round, can they keep the momentum alive?

And, indeed, these are tough times. Unemployment is at a 16-year high (7.2%) and job seekers outnumber openings three to one.

Source: CNN Money

With such dire prospects, you may need to get creative and learn to market yourself in ways you might not have considered before.

For inspiration, look to Jacob Share, who was looking for a position as a Web development manager. He started a chain email by sending his resume and desired job description to his personal contacts, asking them to send it on to anyone they knew who might be able to help. He offered $150 to the person who led him to land a job. And it worked.

Others have purchased billboard space or are wearing T-shirts with their own job ad written on them.

So remember, even though the best way to find a job is through personal networking, it probably wouldn’t hurt to brainstorm a few out-of-the-box ways to market yourself.

Knowing who visits a site, how long they stay, and what pages they visit (among many other things), can make it easy to identify areas for improvement of a website. By knowing how people use a website, it can be optimized to bring in more traffic, make people stay longer and make them visit more pages.

There are several free tools for measuring the traffic of a site internally. One leader in free web tracking is Statcounter, which can be used to track visitors in real time. By inserting their code into a site, users can see information on everyone that visits. Google Analytics offers similar free tools, though their information does not update in real time. Google Analytics has become significantly more robust over the past year, and can track more things, like conversions in Google Adwords, for example.

There are also many free tools available for comparing different websites and the volume of traffic they are getting. The original comparison tool was Alexa, but it has lost considerable legitimacy over the last two years. Compete was a decent replacement, and is considered a more reliable metric than Alexa nowadays.

Rising fast, however, is another service, called Quantcast. The company has redesigned their comparison chart to make it more useful, and the readability is much improved from the previous iteration. Quantcast also offers real-time data, which Compete does not. A major downside to Quantcast is that it does not index sites that aren’t seeing major traffic. Many sites with over 10,000 monthly unique visitors according to Compete are not indexed in Quantcast, which may hurt it’s chances of breaking into the mainstream.

CNN vs. New York Times on Quantcast

Inquistr, however, predicts that Quantcast will rock 2009.

The site allows users to post short messages to all other users that subscribe to their feed, or in Twitter-speak, their “followers”. Messages, or “tweets” have a maximum of 140 characters so updates are quick and to the point on Twitter.

With a little maintenance and promotion, a company can use a Twitter account to reach thousands of people every day for very low costs. The service is free and only requires one or two people to maintain any given account. Below are some suggestions on how to use Twitter as part of your overall online marketing strategy. These can be used for a main company account (like @Shoeboxed and @Grooveshark) or for company employees that also can promote the business to their own contacts (like me, @danenglander).

Strengthen your brand
Using Twitter to talk about your company in an interesting and entertaining way can strengthen your overall brand. By giving your company a personality, you can make your company seem more accessible and friendly. Giving real-time office updates, giving inside information and telling relevant (and tasteful) jokes can go a long way. Make sure to avoid making all your tweets into advertisements, as this will surely turn people off.

Inform people of new products and services of your company
Lots of news actually breaks on Twitter. On many stories the Twitter community was talking about it before the mainstream media. You can do a little news-breaking of your own company by announcing new products and services that your company is offering.

Link to your website, blog or press releases
Twitter allows you to add links to your tweets, so if you have a good number of followers, you can expect a certain number of people to go to your website when you tweet about it and provide a link. This can be a powerful way to drive traffic and increase your company’s exposure.

Weigh in on conversations others have about your company
Using Twitter Search, you can search for your company’s name or your employee’s names. It will return all the tweets in which people mention the terms you search for. This is a great way to seek feedback on your product without putting out a formal survey. You will know what people think about what your company does, and you may find out interesting information that you didn’t already know. Verizon seems to get some bad tweets about its service, for example.

Engage with people talking about your field
You can also use Twitter Search to find out what people are saying about things related to your products or services. If you work for Geezeo.com, for example, you could see what everyone is saying about Mint.com or Wesabe.com, all sites that offer online financial management.

Promote events
If your company is throwing an event or attending a conference, you can tweet about it to generate interest in the event. You may be able to rally a few more people to attend, and you may be able to find other Twitterers at the event. This kind of pre-networking can add value to the relationships you then create in person.

Provide customer support
Many companies, like Grooveshark, often provide customer support over Twitter. If your company’s clients are particularly tech-savvy, it is likely that many of them are on Twitter. By encouraging them to ask questions over Twitter, you can provide quick customer support to people in yet another medium. This adds to your company’s brand as it makes you look more accessible and more helpful.

Inform communities when other communication streams fail
If you ever need to alert people of something about your company and your other methods of communication are shut down, you can use Twitter. Though Twitter has struggled with up-time issues in the past, it seems to be doing better lately, and is now very reliable tool for communicating with customers if your main site or email server is down.

Please add any other comments you have in the comments or tweet them my way to @danenglander.

Use Twitter As Part Of Your Online Marketing Strategy

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter yet, you probably will be soon. This free microblogging service allows you to follow and be followed by others who are posting updates about what they are doing. The 140-character limit on all posts means that updates are short and to-the-point, but marketing on Twitter has emerged as one of the most personal and easy ways of communicating with customers and potential customers. You can also monitor what people are saying about your company using Twitter Search.

A Company Blog

Having a blog for your company is a great way to promote your business by writing positive content, but it is also a great way to communicate with your customers and to bring new customers to your website. You can control how much time and resources you invest in your blog, but it is sure to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and educate others about what your company is really about.

Thank-you cards

You can write out thank-you cards and mail them out to your customers for under $1 per card. By pre-printing a message, you can save even more time and money. I have done this for several different organizations and the feedback is always the same: people like the personal touch! Thank you cards are a great way to cultivate loyal customers and to get them talking about your company.

Email Newsletters

If you collect email addresses of your customers, a monthly newsletter can be a great way to keep your company in the back of their minds. The newsletter should be short, informative, and interesting. Nobody likes to be spammed in a newsletter, so try to keep sales and promotions out of it if possible.

Use your logo

Put your website logo and website URL on everything: stationary, email signatures, t-shirts, post-its, your laptop, etc. The more you can give your brand exposure, the better.

Free press release distribution services

If you have a press release, you should definitely post it on your website, but you can also distribute it via free press release services online. In the past, I have used www.pr.com and www.24-7pressrelease.com and had pretty good success. Also, for another free PR idea, check out my previous post about Help A Reporter Out.

Free Marketing Tips from the National Spending Journal

HARO is a great tool for cheap PR

A few months ago, Peter Shankman, a semi-famous social media expert became a full blow Internet celebrity with the launch of Help A Reporter Out, also known as HARO. This is a free service designed to connect you to journalists and bloggers that might be able to help you in your PR efforts. It’s the best way to get free publicity if your company is strapped for cash or you don’t have much experience in PR.

According to his website, he had a lot friends that were reporters who often asked him to connect them with sources for their stories. Instead of referring them to his own sources, he decided to publish the list of queries out to the public. Maybe they would have the information that the reporters needed.

His decision was a smart one. Originally started as a Facebook group, its popularity exploded, and soon its membership exceeded the 1,200-person maximum that Facebook places on group emails. To continue the service, he made it into an email newsletter, which currently goes out to around 40,000 people three times a day.

Sometimes the queries from reporters can be a little off the wall (like a story about “Blasting Music at Work”), but every once in a while, you are bound to find a reporter looking for you to comment in one of their stories. With enough reporters asking questions, you are bound to find that you are, indeed, an expert on something.

It only takes a few minutes to read the emails everyday, and Shankman’s emails tend to be entertaining anyway. When you finally find a reporter that is interested in your story, you’ll be glad you get the emails. It’s pretty much the easiest way to do in-house PR for any small business. It takes very little time and potential rewards are huge, especially considering that major news outlets like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times regularly ask questions to the HARO community.

DISCLAIMER: Neither I not the Consumer Spending Journal is associated with or is an affiliate of Peter Shankman or HARO. It’s merely a service that we thought should be publicized.

Anyway, although we spend basically our entire lives chugging away at our computers trying to make Shoeboxed into the success we know it will be, we also like to take a step back every once in a while. Recently, we evaluated our marketing and messaging so that we could come up with a new tag line. We had used some sort of random ones in the past, but now I think we’re going to stick with this one for a while.

So without further build up, our new tag line is:

Shoeboxed: Where Receipts Go.

Simple right? Well, we think it captures pretty well what we do here. Your receipts come to us (through several channels), so (by corollary) this is also where they come. And we thought we would point that out.

Anyway, you’ll probably start seeing it around more, so that’s what that is.

Our debut on Wall Street five hours later drew a large crowd. And we met many interesting people. We even found a business analyst who claimed to have every single receipt he’d acquired over the past thirty years – mind you he looked like he couldn’t be older than 32.

When a street preformer got a little crazy and the police began dispersing the crowd, we decided to visit other parts of the Island.

Everywhere we went people stopped us to find out what we were all about. We spread the Shoeboxed love all over the lower east side. For a while, we even staked a claim over NYC’s own Shoebox at Astor Place.

It was a great time. But after three days the lack of sleep had started to get to us! We were happy to head home. If you got a chance to see us, be sure to leave us a comment!

So, can you guess which ride was ours?

Before we launched our public beta in July, our Austrian friend, Flo, made us a flash video attempting to explain how Shoeboxed organizes your finances. Despite the fact that there’s no real explanation of what Shoeboxed does, and that he uses commas instead of decimal points (so Euro, Flo), this video is pretty much perfect.

Just click to view. It should open in your Internet browser.

Enjoy! If anyone wants to volunteer to top this flash video, let me know! We’d love to see it. We might even give you a job if it’s really good!

I just hit the men’s room at RDU before hopping on my flight tonight. Each urinal had a shoeboxed.com business card on top of it.

Don’t really have anything else to add, except that the guy at the urinal next to me took the card off his urinal. I didn’t stick around to see if you guys have someone nearby that runs in an replaces the cards. : )

Hope all’s well.

First of all, this is absolutely hysterical and a testament to our off-the-wall marketing team. Secondly, we may or may not have been passing out flyers at the airport. It is possible that there are some Shoeboxed fans roaming the terminal bathrooms at RDU leaving flyers in unsuspecting places. Who knows where they came from :).

With regard to the runners who come in and replace the cards: that’s one of the funniest mental images I’ve had in a while, so props to our lawyer friend who literally made me laugh out loud.

I wonder if the guy who picked the card up at the urinal ended up signing up. If you’re the guy and you can somehow prove it, we want to hear from you!

For some reason, people were shocked that Bill was coming. People quickly found their movie cameras and filmed away. Others pointed, laughed, and some even pretended not to care, although their eyes were glued to the sign. Head of RDU security stopped us. “You should go check the millionaire’s baggage claim back there!”

Despite the attention we drew, we couldn’t find him in Terminal A or the Millionaire’s baggage cliam. We even checked the restrooms, phone booths, and by the soda machines. So we headed to Terminal C.

In Terminal C, we set up shop at the foot of the escalators by the baggage claim. As people rode down the escalator, jaws dropped, minds were boggled, conversations were dropped. Still, no Bill.

Maybe he’ll make it tomorrow.

Even though we didn’t find him, we definitely got some interesting looks, and people made some pretty memorable comments.

The funniest statements:

“Oh my lord… Bill Gates is coming to town? I’ve been filming a YouTube documentary on my trip. Mind if I include this? Also, remind him to support the baby boomer generation of women, when he comes.”

“Daddy, what’s Shoeboxed.com?”

“You must’ve missed the executive airport!”
“No, Bill is a man of the people”-Etienne

“Which flight was he on? I didn’t see him” – Random Traveler
“Really? He was wearing a Shoeboxed.com T-Shirt!” – Etienne

The looks we got were priceless.