Really Great Business Cards And Do We Even Need Them?
I have always been really judgemental about a person's business card. It's not really fair because a lot of people that work for larger companies have nothing to do with their cards, don't design them, or write the copy on them but I still like to judge a company culture by their business card.
I generally like companies that allow the employee to have some kind of personality showing through on their cards. One agency in Chicago has some free association words describing the person on the back of the card like "twin", "photography", etc.
With online networking, LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, and every other way to contact you online available I am starting to wonder if we even need business cards at all anymore? Honestly, I use them less and less in favor of "I'll find you online".
What are your thoughts, do you use them? Does your personality come through on them?
posted by Caitlin at
12.1.10
5 Comments:
You mean you literally go crazy over business cards, you're so judgmental? You're too easy C-Mac. That is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes.
My business cards suck. They were corporate designed, they're ugly, and they have no personality. I'm embarrassed to give them out.
That said they are eminently functional to me. I am in real estate (how dare you call our industry boring, by the way) and I'm always meeting people at job sites, so I need to have a physical contact memento to press into someone's palm.
I would love to design my own personal cards, even if I have to pay for them.
When you said that "free word association" thing I had a great idea - what if you took the "keywords cloud" you see on blogs, where tags for blogs appear in a group and are bigger if they appear more, and just throw a mini version of that on the back of your card? It would be like a little "personality cloud"... too much?
Royce - true, I suppose there are still some industries that would need the mighty business card.
Here's another question: Can you JUST have business cards and no online profiles? Are they as necessary as business cards now?
Same answer for my industry - none of the dues I'm dealing with give a hoot. Obviously for some people it's different - if you're a broker for people's homes, for instance, then you most definitely should have an online presence - but not where I'm at.
My boss literally said just this morning to our intern, "I have no idea how to use Facebook." That's where I work. Our company (and myself professionally) has almost no internet presence; it's not a priority here.
I rarely use my business cards. In fact, the last couple times that I used them was to enter one of those contests at fast-food restaurants.
"Win a free Chipotle burrito."
I guess it really depends on your profession. Ask our sales guy and he'd tell you that they're a necessity.
Think of business cards as your offline connection to your online profile. When I worked for companies, rarely would I use the provided cards... I usually felt bad because of how much they used to pay for them. But nowadays, it's my connection for people to get a hold of me when I'm not there. Other people use them for me when they want to refer someone to me, I leave them places for others to pick up. Offline SEOing.
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