Messing with a Washington "tradition" - stupid card tricks

By
Andrew
on April 3, 2008 11:49 AM | | Comments (817) | TrackBacks (1)

As a native Washingtonian, I know the value of a good business card exchange. It's almost a ritual here, as well as at most conferences and networking events I attend.

I don't know if I'm behind the times, but after my "conference hell month" I've got about 400 business cards I still need to scan and some to reply to. I should buy a scanner.

However, some of them I'm putting at the bottom of the pile:

    1. If you handed me a "moocard," one of those tiny little calling cards sold using your flickr photos, you've immediately gone to to the bottom of the pile. Why? They're not real cards. They're not useful to me. They don't tell me enough about you for me to remember you, and they all look pretty much alike.

    2. If you hand me a double-sided, glossy business card with no white space, you lose points. Why? Part of the beauty of business cards, is that with a pen, I can write things on them, like how, when, or where I met you, if we have a mutual friend, or anything else that would make me pick your card out of the stack and possibly do something important. When you have shiny, dark colored cards, I can't write on them. You remove a valuable avenue for making your cards a tool, not just something to gawk at. It may look cool, but it's useless to me as a networking facilitator.

    3. Cutesy cards with company-related graphics and logos are ok. Double-sided cards are ok. However, if you must go that far, please, please, please, please have at least one side with some space that I could write on. I cannot stress this enough. When I get home at the end of the day, or even when I make a card exchange (an art in and of itself) I write things down, like the date or event, so I can better mentally sort through who you are, especially at somewhere like SXSW where I came away with 250 cards in 4 days. If you want to be remembered, make it easy. Plus, someone might want to write a note to themselve that they really, really want to do business with you. Make sure there is a place for them to write.

    4. It's ok to be creative, but remember that your card is a tool for helping people remember you, and leaves a lasting impression of how "serious" you are. A quick look at my stack reveals that the vast majority of people who would be considered "important" or that I made a point of getting back to first had uncluttered, easy to read cards with ample writing space, communicated the basic information (name, title contact info) and were generally devoid of clutter, gloss, or garish color schemes. If you had these things, they had better be enough to make me remember you.

    5. If you're going to be creative, be really, really creative. Check out the SXSW Card Collective for examples of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the creative (in a good way).

 

FYI, Here's mine:

andrewfeinberg.jpg

 

Robert Scoble's is awesome, and has enough white space to still be useful. Best of both worlds.

 

robert-scoble.jpg
Is that person happy or horrified? I can't tell.
 
And the winner: Lots of white space, and interactive! Joshua Strebel, of the Unicorn Panel fame:
jshua.png

Back to tech/politics later. I hear there's an Energy bill around.

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