Blog: David Loshin

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Business Card 2.0

http://www.davidloshin.info/As my inventory of business cards is starting to run low, I am considering reprinting them, but I am now posed with a little bit of a quandary. Two years ago when that most recent batch was designed, I considered the contact information I wanted to include: name, company address, telephone, fax, mobile phone, email, web address.

However, in the past few years, my contact avenues have slightly changed – consider the blog that you are now reading. This made me start to think about all the other aspects of contact that might be reasonable to present to a new business acquaintance:

- Skype contact information
- Blogs
- Linkedin
- Myspace
- Facebook
- plus whatever other interesting things are out there...

Then all of a sudden, I started to think about being able to present someone with additional information aside from contact data, such as white papers or powerpoint presentations. Then links to webinars, podcasts, youtube videos. Can you get all this stuff on a business card?

OK, so I brought this up in a recent conversation with Shawn Rogers, mentioning that I wanted to consider options for having a USB business card – printed with standard contact information and with additional material accessible via the USB memory card interface. Unfortunately, I am a little early for that – the technology is still maturing and is prone to not work in many cases.

Shawn’s response was interesting: first, he referred to an emerging protocol for putting traditional contact information on the front and additional content links on the back of the card, and that is certainly a viable option. But then he said that for most purposes, a traditional business card was sufficient for its intent: first line of contact. Secondary lines of contact or “web 2.0”-ish information is appropriate within its own context. So leave the blog address off the physical card, but embed it in your email signature (which I already do).

Here is what I may do: make use of one of my registered domain addresses to host a virtual contact web page and have all my “push” content accessible through that page. Then I can put that web address on the back of the business card for people to access all that additional information.

Oh, and by the way, here is my (very simple) online business card.

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