The business card problem

Courtesy of Mark Lee’s Tweet:

@BradBurton: Also strangers who thrust biz cards in my hand. They need to understand: No one refers work to a biz card: http://bit.ly/6hCb2

I came across his old post from March 2008 where he says (use the bit.ly link above):

I learned long ago never to be a card shover. There’s no point. I always wait to be asked if I have a card AFTER we’ve spoken for a while.

I would stress that I’m referring here to networking events. It’s quite different when you attend a business meeting and everyone exchanges business cards. That’s normally to ensure that all those present know who else is there and which company they are from.

What is the point in shoving your business card into the hand of someone who hasn’t expressed any interest in it?

At best the card will be added to a database of contacts and the person in question may be able to claim to have met their quota of new people that week or month.

At worst you’ll get added to their mailing list (and start receiving emails and/or post that you may or may not want).

There is next to NO CHANCE that they will refer work to you, act as your advocate or decide to engage with you. Why? Because no one refers work to a business card.

Here’s a new angle on this. While at SAP TechEd, several SAP execs were handing out cards. It’s one way to ensure we spell their names and titles correctly. At one session I was sitting next to Tom Raftery who showed me how he deals with business cards. Just as I was quipping that it wasn’t very green of him to be accepting such ‘gifts’ Tom fires up Evernote, snaps a pic of the card with his MacBook Pro’s iSight camera and hands the card back for re-use. How cool (and un-nerving) is that? Evernote has some OCR capability that allows it to see and understand business cards. That alone would be worth the $45 a year Evernote wants for premium services. Especially given what I shelled out for CardScan. And I still have to hang on to the card. Can you imagine having (say) just 50 cards printed and then making them last (almost) forever? Think what that might do for Mac sales, Evernote subscriptions while saving dead tree technology?

Don’t you just love innovation? Don’t you also love how random messages have a way of connecting?

Endnote: I don’t have business cards.

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Tagged as: Evernote, MacBook Pro, OCR, Tom Raftery