Business card analysis 2: re-birth of business card analysis
A loooooonggggg time ago (ok – it was just last year but a lot has happened in the last year), I attended the Sage Marketing Academy in sunny Irvine, California.
The class, led by marketing gurus Dan Kraus and Laura Lorenz of Leading Results (if you need marketing coaching, I strongly recommend them), covered many topics and we did many practical exercises. One of these exercises was teaming up in groups of three to critique each others business cards.
This was very useful and telling and led me to reconsider our card design at Azamba. Particularly because our card had a flipping typo in it!
Luckily, I’m not that beholden to my business cards these days since I discovered this thing called the Internet and have found that I can connect to people easily through handing out my LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter handle. Not a lot of use for cards these days really so it makes it a good opportunity to stretch your creative muscles and do something “fun.”
In that vein and with the upcoming Sage Summit 2012 conference, I thought it was a good time to revist the cards and get a new batch printed.
One route to go with keeping it fun is the collectible, baseball-card like approach with MeetMeme which I was introduced at Sage Summit 2011 by Jess Vento (read more about these cards here).
My group decided to explore a more minimalist version of our previous cards and came up with this:
Since I am not able to avail myself of my peers in the Sage Marketing Academy, I throw it out to you dear readers to let me know what you think.
Good, bad, ugly? What do you like? What do you hate?
While I am deeply in love with the minimalist look and feel, one thing that I somewhat regret is the lack of the LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter handles. The saving grace – in theory – is that our website should have a contact us page that allows people to connect to us via the various social media mechanisms. (We don’t have that page yet but we should before the upcoming Sage Summit conference – stay tuned.)
Hopefully this approach gives others the courage to try something new with their cards. If you have an interesting take on your own cards, stop by and show me at Sage Summit next week. I am always looking for new, creative ideas.
PS. The first 500 to stop by will get a free card as a thank you. You lucky dogs!
Robert Wood
Wayne Schulz
Peter Wolf
I like the look, but anyone who uses a business card scanner will toss your info because your name and company do not appear together on the same side of the card.when parsed by a scanner, it is likely that your company name will be read as “your go to SageCRM partner.” Now, this might work out for you, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Thanks for the feedback Kristi. We definitely hadn’t considered that angle. Hopefully anyone so inclined will provide me a card in return and I can simply send them a vCard or some other way to electronically import my information.
Hi, Peter. You don’t have a lot of information so I’m curious why you chose to use both sides.
You are correct – I wanted each side to look clean with lots of white space.
Plus, Peter, even in the digital age, cards are a useful place to jot down a few notes as you are talking … Looks to me like you’ve taken my “back of card space away”‘. Now I’ll have to photograph you (& record the conversation) with my phone. Or use my own paper
Hi David – you are correct – that is one of the best uses of the back of the card. The card has a lot of white space though so I’m hoping you can squeeze some notes in there. Also … our tagline pretty much should be a reminder if people forget who we are or what we do! Half of my notes on cards are to help me remember who “John Doe” from “ABC Systems Consulting” is and what he does.
Agreed with the premise the bus. card is dying, but around conference time they are essential; if someone visits my stand I always ask for a card.
If you want to stand out, make sure your brand stands out with strong design, your company’s tagline, etc…AND get a professional designer to create them!
Great suggestions James!
I think of businesses cards as a time to tweet on both sides. I think it’s interesting your not defining your company outside of being Sage? On the other hand it’s intriguing enough and clean like I like things to be. Win.
I like the idea of a “tweet on both sides” – very nice.