Biz Card Mythbusters to the rescue…! :-)

I hope you are not referring to Social Media Swami

Shashi

Before you begin your business day, start with the idea that mass majority (You know, the people we all want to buy our service or product – pay you money for what you do) are too busy to think or get interested. Give your company a simple name that connects the value of what you offer to the buyer and create a meaningful tag line. If you can manage that, you can fit your value proposition into the 140 character space provided by Twitter and create a business card that when they pick it up two weeks after the networking event, is still relevant.

Insanely yours,

Chief Innovation Artist

Those type of buzzword cards are obnoxious. They don’t scan well and people don’t put the text in their notes. It seems like a stupid attempt to attract the people who have heard the buzzwords but don’t know what they are and might check the site out. Still if you don’t tell them what you do they will probably not go to your site or contact you in the future.

-Steve

I would totally get cards made for your own personal networking. This way you can have something that will keep things separate for your own use and not risk mixing side work or personal things with your primary job.

Vistaprint.com is a great place to start and is affordable and has many tasteful choices.

-Steve

When a corporation has terrible cards there is not much you can do there. Unless you have some say to get new cards done you are really trapped. The only other way to do it is ask for permission to get your own cards made but they probably won’t let you do that.

-Steve

Using gmail on the backend is perfectly fine. You should set up the e-mail with the domain name to forward.

I use my Yahoo address when filling out web forms and for many other things too.

-Steve

Self-printed, tear-off cards are the equivalent of crayon on construction paper in professional appearance.

I’ve been considering a personal card to use for networking that isn’t done for the company I work for. Something very simple. I haven’t decided yet.

I think I might use my leftover cards to put a coat of wax on my car. :-)

The overly glossy cards are the *worst* – especially at tradeshows when trying to scribble down notes about what you talked about. They look bad, make the card useless and there’s no excuse since a spot uv gloss can highlight aspects of the card individually at very little further cost.

But the most obnoxious print I’ve ever seen was on a consulting firm’s card. About 20 trendy internet related buzz words (social network! web 2.0! viral! long tail!) all over the back…with the company name snuck in there too…blech. Gross.

I collected many business cards at these events and made some pretty good contacts. Many of the tips below made some of the cards which I collected stand out.

The big challenge for me is sitting through 30 hours of meetings over a 3 day period and then getting back home and contacting all of the people on the other end of the cards. Sometimes it takes me a month to get to the task.

Question to all: I haven’t fallen for the trap yet, because I do like scanning business cards in, especially since we have business software that works with our email discussions to track those contacts. So my question is… what does everyone think of “moo cards”. I haven’t tried scanning them, their cute, but … I dunno.

I personally like plain as you described, a little flair, but too much is too much.

I use my gmail address when posting online – but on my cards? My domain name – b/c the first keeps me from having to reroute the email, but the second is all about image.

This is really useful information – I’ll be tweeting it along!
Great post!

So what do people who work for corporations do when they have to use the company business cards just know the design is all wrong?