Moo is a London-based printing company whose unique approach to business cards has made it a hit with professional creatives, The firm’s Printfinity technology allows it to put different images on the back of every card in a fifty-card pack, For photographers and designers, in particular, it has become an easy way to show off skills and distribute contact details.
Recently, Moo has started offering Facebook cards.
Using Facebook’s API, the company will access the main picture in your timeline, together with other basic information including email address and location, and use them to create a business card that matches your Facebook presence.
At the moment, the company is giving the cards away for free. You just have to pay for postage and packing.
It is a move that reflects not just changes in the way that business cards work but the way that business connections in real life are developing.
Once, we would collect business cards at conferences, and come up with some way to file, store and maintain them, We might send follow-up letters and emails to turn face-to-face interest into a real prospect, but the process from card exchange to product delivery was always a little difficult, Move too slowly and a warm handshake quickly becomes a cold memory, Move too hard, and you soon shift from persistent to pest, Anything in between translates into a silence in which nothing happens.
Encourage your real-life contacts to connect with you on your business Facebook page though, or dig them out on Twitter, and you will be able to stay in touch with them naturally, You can comment on their posts, reminding them that you are still around and you can even upload tagged images of the two of you together at the conference, (Those kinds of pictures really should be a compulsory part of the workflow for conference organizers — a vital way of cementing the networking for which people attend business events.)
Forget Your Address
According to Rebeka Fluet, marketing manager for Moo, the company has seen a decline in the use of fax numbers on the business cards they print, and even physical mail addresses are becoming less important, More vital are business social media accounts, the company URL, and email address.
As those physical details have dropped away, business cards have stopped being a way to retain contact information and have become a bridge that allows marketers to shift from an initial, one-off face-to-face contact to an ongoing virtual connection.
And yet, it is notable that the sample cards that Moo shows on its website include one more piece of information, Sandwiched between the Facebook page and the email address is a telephone number, It might come with an icon that looks like the latest smartphone but it still shows that when it comes to developing connections, a virtual relationship is important, but it is not the whole story, You will still have to pick up the phone, hold a conversation and charm, listen, and talk your way to a close — just as marketers have always done.
