Networking

Just because most of my clients contact me online doesn’t mean that that’s how they find me. I ask every new client how they found me and, more often than not, it’s because someone I know recommended me. What’s surprised me, though, is that it isn’t always past clients passing along my email address. More than a few times, it’s been someone that I met at a networking event passing my card along to someone who they thought could use it. These aren’t people who know me well; without that business card in their hands, they would have been hard-pressed to even remember my name. But having that convenient little piece of paper in their pocket led to me landing a new client.

Of course, I’ve landed clients just by heading out to networking events and handing out my business cards in person, as well. There’s a reason that business cards have become standard for business — and why many tools that allow you to share information via smartphone and other gadgets have been slow to catch on outside of technologically-oriented industries.

Professionalism

There are times when even the most web-oriented among us have to meet with people face-to-face. Being able to hand out a business card does more than guarantee that they have your contact information and even goes beyond making it easy to pass it along. It can help establish your professionalism. Depending on the type of work you do, there can be some difficulty in reminding your contacts that you’re a professional — after all, you spend most of your day at home or the coffee shop. But little touches like a professional business card can really help remind clients and colleagues that you are a professional, no matter where you’re working at.

Connecting

I’ve got a couple of business cards in my bag that don’t actually belong to me. I hand them out when I’m handing my own out, though: I have certain people that I work with on a regular basis and if I’m talking about a project they’d be involved in, I like to help them out with a little promotion while I can. They’ve got a stack of my cards, too. The system works out pretty well. We don’t routinely attend events (networking or otherwise) together, but each of us still gets an opportunity to get our cards in the hands of people who might like to work with us. A business card may not be the perfect substitute for your ability to win new clients or projects in person, but it can definitely help in situations where you wouldn’t have been able to be there anyhow.

Do you still use business cards?

Image by Flickr user bargainmoose, licensed under CC BY 2.0

But even the best OCR business card reader technology has limitations. And while adding over 100 business cards to my contact files this week using my NeatReceipts for Mac, I discovered many of them. Cards with certain design features simply didn’t scan well. And as scanning becomes more common, this is something that business card designers should keep in mind. That contact was important enough for you to give your business card to; you need to make sure you make it easy for them to accurately add you to their contacts list — or you risk your card ending up in the trash.

Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts for creating a scannable business card.

Don’t:

• Use fancy fonts. These easily confuse OCR software, especially on letters like “c” and “e”. A clean font like Helvetica may seem boring, but it is easy for OCR to translate.
• Combine your name and title. Names and titles separated by a comma on a single line (such as “Nancy Nally, Editor”) didn’t translate correctly in the OCR I was using.
• Overlay text on a pattern. This is too confusing for OCR.
• Angle text. My scanner’s OCR couldn’t translate text that wasn’t parallel to the edges of the card.
• Mix orientations. Keep all the text oriented in the same direction (preferably horizontally, since my scanner had trouble reading vertically-oriented cards).

Do:

• Keep it big. If you get squinty looking at your card, so will OCR software.
• Give text breathing room. Keep letters nicely spaced so that the OCR can distinguish them easily from each other.
• Keep it light. Cards with dark backgrounds seem impossible to scan (even those with high-contrast white text).
• Put your company name somewhere in text. OCR can’t translate stylized logos, so make sure the company’s name is in text somewhere too.
• Keep it on one side. Scanners only read one side of a card, so keep all the critical contact information on one side.

This last issue was a very common problem with the batch of cards I just scanned. Double-sided printing is becoming very affordable so more people are creating business cards that are printed on both sides. This creates the temptation to spread the critical contact information on both sides of the card, which makes it inaccessible to card reading technology. Ideally, you should have contact information on only one side of the card, and then use the other side for a logo or mini sales brochure. A printer like Moo.com, with its ability to print a different back on each card in a set, offers the ability to get very creative with a card back’s promotional uses. Meanwhile, the front of the card can hold all of the traditional contact information in a clean and simple (scannable) format.

Do you scan business cards? What problems have you come up against?

The folks at Squiz have kindly offered some free cards to WebWorkerDaily readers — the first 25 people to comment on this post will each get a set of 50 cards. (Make sure to use your real email address when commenting.)

There are other things you can do, things that are far more representative of your trade than a lifeless rectangular slip of paper with some contact information printed upon it. That’s not to say that all rectangular slips of paper are without merit, just that most traditional ones just aren’t getting the job done like they used to, following the demise of the Rolodex. Here are some alternatives you may want to consider.

Email/Blog Address Fortune

Maybe I just have a lot of superstitious friends with hoarding tendencies, but I, and people I know, tend to hang on to the fortunes we get from fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants. At least until the next time I wash the pants I’m wearing, at which point I empty out the pockets and re-read said fortune.

Lucky Brand jeans uses this as a marketing tactic, and includes a branded fortune in the pocket of a new pair of its product. You can do the same. Find a memorable quote or write an interesting fortune, print them on slips of paper with your logo if you have one, and put an email or blog address on the back. Handing these out will not only help you network, it should spark conversation, so long as the content you print on them is interesting enough. Try to come up with a variety so that you can hand them out in groups without doubling up.

QR Code

Depending on the crowd you’re mixing with, and whose attention you want to attract, you might want to riff on the traditional business card by handing out cards printed with QR codes. QR codes are a type of barcode that can be used to link to digital content via a scanned, printed symbol. Here’s an example:

QR codes can be scanned by software readers on smart phones with cameras (as long as there’s an app available for the phone, which there often is) and will process the information and launch the appropriate content. For example, the one above should open a link to WebWorkerDaily. You can generate your own QR codes here.

Obviously, you have to be careful who you give this kind of thing to. It works best with tech professionals who’ll either be familiar with QR codes, or with tech enthusiasts who’ll be interested enough to find out more about them.

Contact Info T-Shirt

If you’re going to a trade show or convention, and you aren’t afraid to do a little shameless self-promotion (which you really shouldn’t be if you’re in this line of business), then have a t-shirt printed up with either your email or web address on it.

Now that cell phone cameras are so prevalent it’s unlikely you’ll come across someone who doesn’t have one, all you have to do to share your info with someone is stand very still for a couple seconds while they snap a photo. It’s memorable, it’s environmentally-friendly, and you get to feel like a rock star for a day while getting your picture taken.

Business Rock

This isn’t mine, it’s something I found on Instructables, but it was so off-beat that I had to share. Basically, the idea is just that you find a well-worn lake or river stone, hand-write your details on it, and distribute that in lieu of a business card.

It’s time consuming, sure, but it doesn’t cost a thing, and it will help you stand out from the field, especially if you work in a creative line of business. You can pick up a relatively inexpensive customizable craft stamp if you’d rather simplify and save your hand some cramping, too.

It’s a little out of left field, but maybe in your line of work, that’s seen as a good place to be coming from.

Let’s face it. The business card isn’t useful. It’s a little like wearing a hat in public. An odd tradition left over from a bygone era that evokes some nostalgia, but that’s about it. You don’t have to start carrying around a sack of rocks, necessarily, but try and shake things up a bit, and your business relationships will benefit.

What business card alternatives do you use or have you come across and thought about using? Any tangible benefits to do doing things differently?

Photo credit: bargainmoose

CloudContacts, a startup aiming to make the information stranded on business cards more accessible, added a new service to its offering this week.

While they may seem archaic, business cards are still the de facto way of sharing contact information. After attending a conference or event I usually have quite a few of them tucked away in my pockets. Extracting that information accurately into my contact manager after the event, however, is a real chore. CloudContacts already offers a pretty innovative service that involves mailing in those business cards you have cluttering up your desk. CloudContacts enters the data on the cards to its online contact management service, which then allows you to export the information to your email app, CRM system or contact manager.

The new service enables you to submit your cards via email. You simply take a snap of the business card with the camera on your phone, email it to the service (via a unique email address generated for your account, similar to the way that TwitPic works) and the information on the card is extracted added to your CloudContacts contact manager.

I tried the system out with a couple of cards and it worked well. Getting a decent snap of one of the cards with my iPhone’s camera proved pretty difficult as it had a small font and a low-contrast combination of black text on a blue background. I managed to get an OK picture but thought that it might cause some problems for CloudContacts as the text was very hard to read in the photo. Not so — CloudContacts captured all of the information from the card perfectly, which was impressive.

A contact's details page

A third card, one of those tiny MOO mini-cards that are popular with folks working on the web, proved impossible to photograph properly with my iPhone’s camera; the text was simply too small.

The CloudContacts contact management app is straightforward, though it has a couple of nice frills including automatically pulling in a Google Map and Twitter widget (if a Twitter username is present) into your contacts’ details pages. It makes it easy to export your contact data into a number of different file formats for import to your favorite email app or contacts manager.

Pricing starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 cards. For large quantities of cards, it would be less hassle to use the CloudContacts mail-in service; CloudContacts view email subscription as a good way to “top up” your card contacts, rather than a way to input lots of cards.

CloudContacts pitches this service as more accurate and less hassle than business card scanning hardware. Having never used a business card scanner, I can’t attest to that, but with business card scanners costing upwards of $150, the pricing is reasonable.

How do you get business card data into your contacts manager?

Earlier this month at the Mobilize conference, I must have passed out a hundred cards; doing so reduced my weight by about 3 percent because I have the heavy stock card type. Towards the end of the event however, I witnessed “business card nirvana”. Andy Abramson and I were chatting about mobile technologies over drinks when all of sudden he whips out his BlackBerry to send a text message.

Note: we don’t recommend nor condone drinking and texting here at WWD.

Andy asked for my e-mail address as he’s texting something to 41411. Curious, not tipsy, I oblige. Less than a minute later, my iPhone receives an e-mail with all of Andy’s contact information. Even better, there’s an attached vCard containing that info, making it simple to import Andy’s details into my Contacts application. Drop. Dead. Simple.

Dropcard is the solution that Andy used and it’s free for a basic account. Once you sign up and enter your contact information in a virtual business card, you’re set. Using text messaging, all you need to know is someone’s e-mail address and then you simply text 41411 with a command like: “drop kevin@gigaom.com”. The “drop” command tells the Dropcard folks to shoot your contact details to the e-mail address you specify. There’s even a few shortcut commands to speed up the process: you don’t have to type the “gmail.com” bit of an address, for example. Dropcard will assume that no domain in the address means Gmail.

The free account allows you to pass 15 virtual business cards a month, offers two profiles and includes an on-line contact list. $4.99 a month nets you up to 100 Dropcards a month, 20 profiles (for you secret-agent types) and a logo or photo on your Dropcard. Up the ante to $9.99 a month for unlimited Dropcards.

While I’ll still always have a few paper business cards on hand, it’s a safe bet that most people I meet have e-mail addresses. If they have one, I’ll hang on to the physical card and shoot them a Dropcard.